Surf Park Petri Dish: A New Frontline In The Surf Culture Wars

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This is an excerpt from our feature ‘A Candy-Coloured Chlorine Dream’ in Issue 589; Which includes four very different stories on the wave pool phenomena. Our new mag is on stands now, available for purchase online, or click here to subscribe and read all of Tracks premium content!

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Post surf, beer in hand, my wife and I are watching my new-to-surfing kids, nine and11, riding waves at The Wave in Bristol. Of the 400 waves the Wavegarden’s modular electromechanical system had provided in an hour, they’d stood up on around 15 each.

It had cost me roughly $160, and I was doing an internal balance sheet of the financial liability verse the obvious kids-smiles-on-dials asset. Was this, “The Ultimate Surfing Experience” as advertised on the site? Every minute or so, however, our view would be obscured.“Just what are the grown men doing on those long skateboards,” interjected my non-surfing wife. “And why are they gyrating like Spider from School of Rock?”Spider, you may remember was the sinewy, snake-hipped character who replaced Jack Black’s Dewey as a guitarist in School ofRock.Now, these men weren’t wearing leatherjackets which only consisted of the sleeves and collar but were punters doing reps of the pool’s flat pavement on longboards.They were mostly aged between 30 and 45; white, muscular of deportment, postures of preening peacocks and giving off the whiff of men who had turned up for the day in an Audi Quattro.Her next question, the more pertinent one, was, “Does this happen at the beach?” Or to paraphrase, is there such a thing as wave pool surf culture? And was this it? And just where the fuck are we headed?

With current wave pools operating from Seoul to Switzerland, Bristol to Brazil,Perth to Paris, and Texas to Tullamarine, there’s a new way of surfing. And it isn’t just based on alliteration. What is it? Why is it? Is localism dead? Is the equal allocation of waves, and the positive vibes that come with it a utopia, or a watered-down dystopia? How does existing surf culture fit in?And where will it take the sport?

That was a lot of questions. My wifes topped listening after I mentioned Switzerland. She was looking at her phone. “Did you know the actor who played Spider is now a Texas District Attorney?” She asked.“Like, derr,” seemed the obvious response.

From Ludwig to Rick Kane to Yeppoon… and Beyond

Now wave pools aren’t new. In the 19th century Bavarian King ‘Mad’ Ludwig II electrified one of his private lakes in Neuschwanstein Castle to create artificial waves. Strange that the equivalent of sticking an 8000-volt toaster in a bath, and then bodysurfing it, didn’t catch on.

In the 1930s, a public swimming pool in Wembley, London created ripples similar to the ocean’s flowing motion. A quantumesque leap took us to 1985 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the Inland Surfing Championships was the first professional surfing event to be held in a pool.

Just two years later the cult surf movie ‘North Shore’ was released. In that, the main character, Rick Kane, uses his winnings from a wave tank surfing contest in his native state of Arizona to fly to Hawaii to try to become a professional surfer. That pool was based on Big Surf, in Tempe,Arizona. That opened in 1969-70 and essentially opened the doors for modern artificial wave pools. However, in 1987 the premise of a wave pool kid conquering Pipe was ludicrous. By 2027 it could be entirely possible.

“There’ll be kids in Seoul and Scotland, who will have learned to surf in their local surf parks,” says Andy Higgins, the Marketing Manager of Wavegarden. Higgo ran the first couple of Rip Curl Search events in the 2000s and now scouts for new destinations around the world for The Cove tech. “No doubt there will be a couple with special talent that will develop into incredibly gifted technical surfers, perhaps as good as we’ve seen.”

Maybe those ‘parkers’ will need to bunk up with Occy to learn the surfing culture ropes on their first trip to Hawaii.

Occy, who played himself so badly in‘North Shore’ that he accidentally invented another character, has thrown his Surf Park chips at the Surf Lakes in Yeppoon.The plunger, with its industrial gothic groans, is yet another emerging tech that has come post Allentown.

First, there were wave pools in Malaysia, Tenerife, and the UAE that used classic pump-and-dump hydraulics to create just-about-surfable waves in the 2000s. In 2005 José Manuel Odriozola and Karin Frisch built their first Wavegarden hydrofoil prototype in the Spanish Basque Country.

A decade later Kelly Slater dropped a clip of himself riding his first wave at the Surf Ranch. “This is the best man-made wave ever built, without doubt,” he said in the clip which broke the surfing section of the Internet. Once the wave of the future for all surfers, it is yet to be replicated anywhere else. It has every chance of becoming the Betamax of the surf park world. Superior quality, but not commercially viable.

In 2018, Perfect Swell brought their airgun to the wave pool arms race with their pool in Waco, Texas. That had 24 ten-foot-wide air chambers fired in unique sequences to produce up to 180 waves per hour. Endless Surf and Wave Loch also use pneumatic tech in their systems.

However, it is Wavegarden who is currently the world’s biggest commercial player with public pools in Wales, Bristol, Melbourne, Switzerland, Brazil, and Seoul, and 30-plus other projects in development across five continents.

Petri Dish: Surf as Culture

The result is that in the last few years wave pools have become a place where surfers; beginner, intermediate, and expert, have gathered. The culture, if there is one, is nascent.

Now, surf culture is hard to define in any case, but two of its most primitive and intertwined base notes are lineup etiquette and localism. In the pools, both have been neutered.

Unlike in the ocean, getting a wave doesn’t revolve around the usual lineup variables; your ability, how aggressive you are, how big your board is, whether you have testicles or not, or if you grew up there. Every-one has paid the same coin to surf, so every-one gets the same opportunity.

Of course, you have to have the coin. Poor surfers, and their kids, are locked out of the transaction. That will change the demo-graphics and dynamics of the culture. For all the talk of diversity and attracting new urban or minority groups to the sport, the price of entry remains the biggest barrier to entry. ‘The Wave’ as it’s called, sits adjacent to Bristol, one of the UK’s most diverse cities, yet the lack of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) surfers is all too obvious. In Switzerland, an hour session starts at $130, Melbourne isn’t too far off that price.

The Sao Paulo pool in Brazil is private and included as part of an upmarket residential development. The blurb says, “We will create a city-based project themed around surfing, sports, lifestyle, gastronomy and community.” We can’t see many talented kids from the favelas getting a start in any of these Brazilian pools.

Meanwhile, a new surf park proposed in Wiseman’s Ferry, offers investors,“Increased annual yields and 25-second waves.” It also boasts that it will have Sydney’s first point break, which might be news to Cronulla and Dee Why locals.These models could mean surf parks are destined to be just for the country club set, with no real relation to the surf culture that has been fermented at beaches, bars, and carparks for the last 50 years. At least there’ll be valet parking…

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