Build the latest high-tech surfboard and you end up with . . . a surfboard. A piece of equipment. Engineered surf is a different story. The notion that humans can alter, improve, and even create the animating force of surfing itself has put hardcore surfing futurists into a state of swoon for almost fifty years.
During that period, hundreds of ideas for enhanced or artificial surf have been carefully drafted, dozens of scale models made, and a handful of projects were built. None of the really elaborate projects have come into being, though. Funding, liability, environmental concerns, even thorny surf-based morality questions: something has always stood in the way, and the breakthrough project has always been just around the corner.
Manufactured waves are separated into two basic categories. The fully artificial self-contained environment—usually a wavepool—is one. The other involves working with what’s already there; you reconfigure the shoreline to improve an existing break or to create one outright. Civil engineers, hired for industrial-grade harbor and beachfront projects, have been doing this inadvertently for decades. True, a few breaks have been destroyed—surfing environmentalists long waved the bloody flag of Killer Dana, a beautiful headland-fronted Orange County point wave buried in 1967 beneath the new Dana Point Harbor. On balance, though, the results have usually broken in the surfer’s favor. Sandbars and channels took shape next to piers. Hot rebound peaks formed next to jetties. Waves peeled into reef passes that were dynamited open for boat traffic. Sebastian Inlet, Ala Moana, Bay of Plenty, Santa Cruz Harbor, and Duranbah—some of the world’s finest breaks are engineering byproducts.
Conversely, nearly every one of the dozen or so finished projects actually designed to produce surfing waves has underperformed. Work on Pratte’s Reef, the best-known American effort—paid for with settlement money won by Surfrider Foundation against a Los Angeles–area Chevron oil refinery—began in late 2000. Two hundred geotextile sandbags, each weighing thirteen tons, were crane-dropped into position off an urbanized strip of Los Angeles County beach called El Segundo. The results were embarrassing. Larger waves broke out past the sandbags; medium-sized waves warbled slightly as they passed by; smaller waves didn’t respond at all. In less than a year, Pratte’s was deemed an utter failure: the reef didn’t cover enough acreage; the bags were too far inshore and not stacked high enough. Adding insult to injury, the cloth material was tearing and sand was leaking out. None of the few hundred thousand wave-riders living within an hour’s drive of Pratte’s Reef even considered it a surf break.
SUPERBANK, QUEENSLAND, 2005.
MICK FANNING, SUPERBANK.
A bigger and better-designed sandbag reef was installed in 2000 at a place called Narrowneck on Queensland’s Gold Coast. This one was a qualified success. Wave quality was improved, but hardly rendered perfect, and again there were problems with the bags falling apart. At New Zealand’s Mount Reef—same thing. Meanwhile, a ten-thousand-ton limestone-boulder reef was dropped into place at Cable Station, near Perth, again with mixed results. What had been a near-waveless bit of coast was now surfable about half the year, but wave quality was middling, and the line-up was perpetually jammed.
Back in Queensland, ASP president Wayne Bartholomew helped convince state government officials to take the sand from a rivermouth dredging project, pipe it around nearby Tweed Head, and aim it downcoast. This was risky. Among the breaks that would be affected was Kirra Point—already known as one of the word’s best waves. By 2001, an enormous tract of fine-grain rivermouth sand had filled into the designated two-mile zone, creating an absurdly long wave that the Australian surf press immediately named “Superbank.” As ASP pro tour contest was held there, and Surfing named it one of the ten best waves in the world.
Then again, Kirra and three other popular breaks vanished, and the Superbank crowd ranged from thick to impenetrable. As Australian surf journalist Tim Baker noted, “Superbank is capable of producing mile-long rides, multiple ten-second barrels, and the kind of peak surfing experience fantasies are made of. Except it’s almost impossible to go more than fifty feet without being dropped in on.” As many as eight hundred people have been counted in the lineup. By 2007, most of the top Gold Coast surfers—including Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, and even Wayne Bartholomew—were campaigning to redirect the piped-in sand, allow Super-bank to wash away, and do what was necessary to restore Kirra.
If nothing else, the Superbank experiment proved that sand placement alone—not artificial reefs—could be used to great wave-crafting effect. The mistake was in applying the technology to a piece of coast that, in terms of waves, didn’t need fixing.
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There was a lot of complaining and finger-pointing in the wake of these generally unimpressive wave-making efforts. Designers usually pointed out that their projects were smaller than originally planned and underfunded. (Pratte’s Reef and Mount Reef cost $500,000 and $1.2 million, respectively. By comparison, the price tag for rebuilding Huntington Pier in the early 1990s was nearly $11 million.) In at least one case, designers said that builders had incorrectly positioned segments of reef.
The bigger truth, though, was that the science and theory behind all the projects was no longer looking all that solid. “It’s like anything else in nature,” Surfrider environmental director Chad Nelson said in 2006. “You start manipulating it, and you don’t know exactly what the end result will be. After you’ve taken the science as far as it can go—it’s still just a structure out there. It might work in some places. It might not work in others.” Surfrider was generally against artificial waves. While all those piers, jetties, and harbors had accidentally created a lot of primo surf, coastal development in general was still an environmental despoiler. If surfers were in the business of coastal engineering, that weakened their own moral arguments when opposing non-surf-related projects.
Meanwhile, there were potential liability issues, especially in America. “Someone, eventually, is going to faceplant hard on a reef built by the state,” Surfing magazine’s environmental editor Marcus Sanders wrote in 2002, “and then go looking for a big fat court-ordered payoff.”
None of these real or potential setbacks were enough to put off the true believers, many of whom attended one or more of the Artificial Surfing Reef Symposium events, held five times between 1997 and 2006. It was hard to come out of one of these cheerful semi-scholarly confabs, with their earnest keynote speakers, presentations, and panel discussions, and not be at least a temporary convert to idea that designed surf could be a force for good. Yes, there are environmental concerns and liability issues. But humankind’s coastal tinkering—mostly by accident, occasionally by design—has resulted in a big net gain for surfers.
Further, once in place, what’s changed is unseen. Surfers don’t think about the provenance of their reefs and sandbars, including the engineered ones. The fundamentals for evaluating a good break are no different at Superbank or Ala Moana than they are at Jeffreys, or Padang, or any other naturally-occurring break. Wind, swell, tide, crowds: that’s how you pick a spot.
Surf in a Box: Wavepools
The second way to make an artificial wave is to leave the ocean and build, literally, from the ground up. There are a few different design types, but wavepools have always gotten the most attention, and by the late 1980s more than a dozen wavepools of varying size and design were in operation worldwide.
The idea actually goes back a lot further. London’s Wembley Swimming Pool, a paddle-churning wavepool prototype, opened in the summer of 1934. Big Surf, America’s first entry, located in the middle of the Arizona desert and powered by a three-story, seventy-thousand-gallon rectangular cistern—the toilet tank as wave-making element—opened in 1969.
Things only got stranger from there. Among the pools that opened in the 1980s and 1990s, one was located in the middle of Pennsylvania Amish country, and another, in Edmonton, Canada, was set in the middle of the world’s biggest shopping mall. Japan’s Ocean Dome—the only pool designed to make a tu
bing wave—was housed in what one surfer called a “Truman Show micro-universe,” with iridescent blue water, a beach made from six hundred tons of polished marble chips, various hyper-colorized tropical settings projected onto the dome’s curved walls, and a flame-belching volcano. Most of the pools held about one million gallons of water; the Edmonton monster was nearly triple that. An Olympic-sized swimming pool, for comparison, holds about six hundred thousand gallons. Some, like Big Surf, used the “flush” method to create waves. Most were powered by a row of diesel-fueled hydraulic plungers, which could be synchronized in different ways so as to produce different wave types; the Ocean Dome pool, for example, could throw out a longer right at the pool’s north end, then three short peak waves at the south end.
None of the wavepools were designed primarily for stand-up surfing. They were meant to be day-trip attractions, like waterslides, and the idea was to put a thrill—not too big a thrill; safety first—into the pool experience. Most of the surfing was done by first-timers on spongy park-rented boards. But because wavepool owners all want to pick up a little beach cred, and because the surf industry is always on the lookout for ways to present the sport to a larger audience, wavepool events involving some of the word’s best surfers were a fairly regular occurrence from the mideighties to the midnineties. On the outskirts of Cleveland, Free Ride star Peter Townend night-surfed the Wave at Geauga Lake Amusement Park. Reigning world champion Tom Carroll beat future world champion Derek Ho in the finals in the 1985 World Inland Surfing Championships, held at Wildwater Kingdom in Allentown, Pennsylvania. TV cameramen filmed Kelly Slater’s every move as he rode Disney World’s new Typhoon Lagoon in 1990. When Laird Hamilton flew in from Hawaii to christen the new Mandalay Bay Resort wavepool in Las Vegas, management proudly cranked the dial to “high,” which only sent a blanket of water sluicing beyond the pools’ far edge. The engines were killed, and a pair of cabana boys were sent over to fish out the lounge chairs floating in the lineup.
WAVEPOOL AT THE ILL-FATED RON JON SURFPARK, ORLANDO, FLORIDA.
“THE PURITY OF SURFING, IF THERE EVER WAS SUCH A THING, HAS BEEN CHEWED UP AND SPIT OUT SO MANY TIMES OVER THE YEARS THAT IT DOESN’T EVEN CONCERN ME.”
—Jamie Meiselman, Ron Jon Surfpark CEO
Hardcore wavepoolers remain unbowed by these designer-surf embarrassments. All the existing wave-making technology in the world, in fact, doesn’t really matter. Stepping stones, nothing more. The wavepool of the future, they believe, will provide endless, dependable, adjustable, always-perfect waves. No lulls or flat spells. No lineup hassling. No reef cuts, polluted water, shark attacks, closeout sets, or dry-run surf trips.
There has always been just enough progress to keep the idea balanced at the fuzzy edge of possibility. During the eighties and nineties, photographs and video clips turned up occasionally, showing the latest scale-model wavepool, usually in some industrial park warehouse, pumping out a shapely, freshwater tube. There were a few weird offshoot developments, too, including the Wave Cannon, the Flying Reef, and a device called the Flowrider, where a set of high-powered nozzles blasts a sheet of water onto a foiled polyurethane ramp, which flips the water up and over into a standing wave. The Flowrider board is short and finless. The ride feels more like snowboarding than surfing and drones on for as long as you remain standing.
To mark the 2005 debut of Bruticus Maximus, a powerful new Flowrider machine in a San Diego surf-themed entertainment center, the owners invited a handful of pro surfers and snowboarders and turned them loose at night, beneath an overhead matrix of flashing colored floodlights, with heavy metal thundering from a PA system. Grandstand viewers roared approval and pumped their fists as Bill “Beaker” Bryan, wearing knee-length flower-print jams and a Halloween-orange jersey over his wetsuit, landed an inverted full-rotation aerial, then did a cutback that sprayed water outside of the enclosure. Not once during the exhibition did the wave slow down, stop, or change shape.
The wavepool project seemingly took a major step forward when the Ron Jon surf shop chain—which included a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot turquoise-and-gold mirror-fronted beachfront redoubt in Cocoa Beach—announced that it was bankrolling a $10-million Surfpark, with a projected opening sometime in early 2005. The Surfpark blueprint featured three wavepools, including a Pro Pool that backers claimed would produce a hollow, eight-foot, hundred-yard-long wave every fifteen seconds. Even better, the pool’s bottom would be lined with a huge, shape-shifting, cable-ribbed bladder. “Everything is controlled by computers,” the pool’s designer explained. “So you have a screen that says ‘Burleigh Head,’ or ‘Pipeline,’ or whatever, and you press a button and winches move the cables to the right length to give it the shape of that particular reef.” Wavepool fans rushed to the Surfpark Web site and took in the complex’s “virtual tour,” which included a video clip of a 1:8-scale version of the Pro Pool. There it was. Perfect mini-tubes spinning off inside a shallow concrete tank. “It’s going to be a whole lot easier to stay home,” world-ranked Floridian surfer Cory Lopez said, “with a world-class wave down the street.”
The Surfpark groundbreaking was delayed until early 2006. When one of the smaller pools had a public unveiling, the waves were small and dribbly—same as ever. Then more delays. In 2008, just as the economy began tanking, the whole project was scrapped.
The wavepool’s problems, by this time, seemed almost existential. Why was there no high-end, tricked-out, wave-making pleasure palace in Orlando or anywhere else? Maybe because it was already exactly where it belonged—in the fantasy-prone surfer’s imagination. Or maybe because the sport’s immune system, although compromised, is strong enough nonetheless to repel this kind of blueprinted, finely calibrated fakery. Perhaps surfing hasn’t seen the last of its better self.
The End of History
From a certain angle, surfing’s progression through the past few decades looks nearly blurred with momentum and change. What to make of the Millennium Wave? Or the fifty-two-thousand-square-foot surf shop? Or downloaded images of surfers jamming turns in Russia, Yemen, and Antarctica? How to mark the evolutionary distance between a garage-built redwood plank taking shape in a hand-tooled flurry of woodshavings to a Thai-made, factory-stamped, plastic-laminate import?
From another angle, though, the sport remains very much unchanged. All those women and silver-haired seniors now in the lineup—that’s a throwback to ancient times. Spirituality is a constant. Old Hawaii’s wave-riding deities, Tom Blake’s notion that the “voice of the wave” is that of God, a slightly tongue-in-cheek Surfing cover blurb reading “It’s Official: Surfing Is a Religion”—all three fit neatly on the same historical skewer.
“SURFING WILL NEVER DIE FROM OVER-POPULARITY. IT JUST SHEDS A SKIN OR TWO AND RENEWS ITSELF.”
—Nick Carroll
Then there’s the perpetual urge to recontextualize the sport—to see waves in clouds, shrubbery, even the curled edge of a potato chip; to “surf” on banked asphalt or a snow-covered mountain. Depression-era surf goddess Mary Ann Hawkins rode her plank through the flooded streets of Redondo Beach after a storm, holding a rope tied to the rear bumper of a Chevy coupe. Sixties champion Rodney Sumpter paddled into a tidal bore rolling up the Severn River. In the summer of 2007, big-wave charger Garrett McNamara flew to a bay on Alaska’s Copper River that ends flush against a four-hundred-foot pale blue vertical-faced glacier. The water was gritty with silt, and 35 degrees. As slabs of ice broke off the cliff front and exploded into the water below, McNamara rode the devouring half-frozen waves that radiated from the point of impact.
None of these events, and a hundred more in kind, have had the slightest effect on surf history. But they all underscore the fact that surfers invariably do whatever it takes to bring the sport ever more front and center in their lives. You watch a mud-churning river bore and want to grab your board. You see God in the hollow of a breaking wave. Surf lust, surf passion, surf fever—it never changes.
This deeper historical const
ancy turns a lot of boldface items on the sport’s recent timeline, on closer inspection, into fringe developments. Tow surfing and slab riding gained everybody’s slack-jawed attention—but just a few dozen crazies actually bought a PWC and joined in. Bustin’ Down the Door, an acclaimed 2008 documentary focusing on the origins of the pro tour, claimed that professionalism “established surfing as a legitimate sport [and] captured the imagination of the world.” Nonsense. Professional surfing didn’t even capture the imagination of most surfers. “Contests generally don’t attract us as fans,” surf journalist Sam George noted a few years ago. “We don’t want to watch. We want to get out there and ride.”
It isn’t that these and other headline developments don’t matter. They do. Surfers may not care who won last week’s pro event, but they’ll want to know about the world champ’s strange new board. Never mind that most surfers find the thought of actually riding a triple-thick fifteen-foot slab about as attractive—and as likely—as a free-solo climb up K2; those slabby, death-defying photos and videos will still get them pumped to charge the local shorebreak in the morning. It all filters down. It feels good to be a member of a sporting confederacy stocked with champions, builders, zealots, and nutjobs. Surfers draw pride from the fact that their sport has left its own small but distinct imprint on the world, and continues to do so. Among the five-million-or-so majority in the sport who don’t tow surf, there is a kind of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that wave-riding still presents itself, a century into its modern era, as a work in progress.
But there’s a much greater appreciation for what can’t be changed. The dependable thrill of going from land to water. The promise that a lot of daily accumulated hassles and worries won’t be able to follow. The meditative effect of staring out for long mindless periods at water and sky. Three hundred waves, give or take, move across a given surf break over the course of an hour. Every surfer, everywhere, along a span of millennia, has been raised and lowered by the same atavistic rhythm.
The History of Surfing Page 74
