Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Five different waves for various levels of surfer skill and generated seconds apart by the single plunger. A bigger wave just needs a bigger plunger.
https://www.surf-lakes.com.au/prototype/
Disclaimer: I live on the Sunny Coast so possibly biased in wanting to see Occy and his partners make it work.
Ah, don't sweat it little grom, there's still plenty of free non-designer waves to mash out on the nar
> He chortled, but he did not stop peering across the water, assessing the waves and the state of the pool during the three minutes that it was left to settle between waves.
1 wave every 3 minutes will never be economically feasible. They're currently charging $10,000 per hour, whereas BSR charges $60 per hour and you get several times as many waves per session.
American Wave Machines' system can already pump out a full set of waves every 10 seconds AND they can change the shape with the push of a button. Beginner, intermediate, advanced, left, right, air sections, barrels, they do it all.
Slater's wave will never be anything more than a toy for himself and a few of his close friends. Every surfer I know said the surf ranch competition was the most boring thing they ever watched.
The Surf Ranch can do some of this... they apparently have over 50 wave types. I'm not sure if it's as versatile, but it's more than just one type of wave. The wired article from September did a better job of talking about the tech (albeit, not much):
https://www.wired.com/story/kelly-slaters-artificial-surf-po...
"I said can you picture some kid who just learns in a wave pool but has this perfect wave at his disposal, and becomes unimaginably skilled, and becomes a world champion because they trained on this incredible wave. And she says yeah, and then they paddle out at the pipeline and drown. And we both laughed"
But it totally glosses over the environmental impact and the hypocrisy of the entire thing. Surfers like Kelly Slater and Steph Gilmore are huge environmental advocates, yet the pool uses and absolutely obscene amount of electricity and water every day (the water usage is worse, using up to 300,000 gallons a day!!!) and everyone is being flown there on private jets.
It’s also just localism all over again, except now it’s just straight up money that keep you out of the club instead of a more abstract idea of being a local.
As far as I know they're involved in several projects researching locations for new waves.
River waves also tend to be sensitive to flow, changing pretty dramatically (or even disappearing) with more or less water. There are plenty of river waves that attract surfers, like the Lachine waves near Montreal. But even at their best, they're not like ocean waves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHYffdBNmI
Some of the local surfers actually found a company which is constructing river waves based on simulation:
The pool does use a ton of water when it gets (re)filled, but that's only a few times a year. Filling the entire pool uses about the same amount of water as the average California golf course uses in one day...
It’s also just localism all over again, except now it’s just straight up money that keep you out of the club instead of a more abstract idea of being a local.
The Surf Ranch is a high-end/test pool, and they've been pretty open about that.
Source: Got to visit the wave pool and talk to the employees during the Surf Ranch Pro in September.
EDIT: Follow-up. For point of comparison, while 300,000 gallons sounds like a lot, a "storm" in LA can drop 100 million of gallons of rainwater in 24 hours...LA's catchbasin system absorbed 22 billion gallons of water in the 4 month period between October 2016 and Jan 2017 (https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/01/23/68360/how-much-storm-wa...)
> The Surf Ranch is a high-end/test pool, and they've been pretty open about that
My point isnt that its not cool, its more that its the anti-thesis of surfing as a whole.
guaranteed if you go out to your local beach and poll the surfers, 50%+ are well-paid workers in corporate america, otherwise they wouldn't have the means and time to buy all the gear needed and live close enough to the beach to surf as a hobby
the wave machine is perfect for practicing, showing off, and competing for a televised audience, which will bring in more sponsors and of course put more money/attention into the sport. the surf you know is mostly dead [1], which isn't necessarily a bad thing, everything changes
It's extremely humid there most of the year. It doesn't get much rainfall but it's not a dry place by any means, and its definitely not a desert.
So, if it's OK for a golf course to waste a bunch of water, then it's OK for everyone to waste a bunch of water.
Got it.
/Lives in the desert. Gets annoyed by people in water scarce environments making excuses for wasting water.
1) It's not a water-scarce environment. The Surf Ranch is surrounded by farms.
2) The Surf Ranch uses less water than its surrounding properties, and uses less water than an activity that most people in dry climates regard as a waste of time (i.e. golfing).
Like all pools, it takes a lot of water. They don't just dump the water into the system. They have tanks on-site to reclaim most of it, and a neighboring overflow/storage pool to minimize water wastage.
And this is just the beta pool, where they're trying to figure out the wave mechanics. Commercial pools like the one in Florida will have more advanced water reclamation/recycling systems.
Being surrounded by farms doesn't mean it's not water scarce. People have been irrigating desert for thousands of years.
The location is classified as BSk "semi-arid"†, just two notches above full-on desert.
The Surf Ranch uses less water than its surrounding properties
Re-read my comment above indicating that two wrongs don't make a right.
And this is just the beta pool, where they're trying to figure out the wave mechanics
What does it matter if it's a test pool, not? There are plenty of places with tons of water to spare in the same time zone.
If you want to see an example of a wasteful activity in the CA Central Valley, check out https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-quietly-amasses-califor... (also posted on HN earlier today). The Surf Ranch replaced a farm, and over the year uses less water than the farm it replaced, so that counts as a net benefit.
No, it doesn't. Less waste is still waste.
If you want to see an example of a wasteful activity in the CA Central Valley
Continued whataboutism.
You and I will just have to agree to disagree on the whole notion of two wrongs making a right.
>>uses less water than the farm it replaced, so that counts as a net benefit.
>No, it doesn't. Less waste is still waste.
If waste is bad and this wastes less, that is a net improvement from a waste perspective regardless of whether or not you think it's good for the world.
EDIT: If you have a personal story to tell about water waste, sharing that would go a long way towards helping the rest of us be able to connect with your position.
I'd say any sport that has a world cup style of competition, where you are constantly flying to different locales isn't very environmentally friendly.
But I see this in skiing/snowboarding (and other outdoor sports). What is the angle that these athletes use to show their pro-environment slant? Is it all just talk/greenwashing? Or is it just that they don't feel their personal environmental impact is all that important?
One thing that struck me is how he describes the physical attraction of the wave, the need for it. After spending every surf session in your entire life waiting for a good wave, yearning for it, scrutinizing each swell to see if this is finally the right one, to have this perfect wave available whenever you want... It must be like handing the keys of the prescription drugs cabinet to an opioid addict.
I wonder if a good parallel for the wave machine is the advent of climbing walls in the 80s. I would say, 40 years on, that indoor climbing walls have indubitably been a Good Thing for climbing in general. Yet I'm pretty sure they sparked the same debates about the nature of the sport, its democratization and professionalization, etc. when they made their first appearance.
It after a while it struck us, "Oh, that's how you get good at surfing. Good, consistent waves." We came back a hundred times better at surfing, but it ruined UK waves for us. Waiting six months for a good day wasn't much fun.
We turned to kitesurfing.
I would love to have one of these wave parks near us, it would be so much fun to play around in.
Surfstream[2] is more practical.[2] It's a surfing treadmill - the wave stays in one place. Uses a modest sized pool.
SurfStream is nothing like real surfing.