Slater's wave pool

What?!

I would tear the lip off that mfer and get pitted so deep and i am sure i would get completely axed many times but with pleasure. Lets go there ....now!

This is just cheating... but looks like so much fun

So cool

about a hour away from my house. Need to go check it out.

Thats pretty incredible, did a little digging, here is a cool article and it shows a top view video of how it works down the page a bit. Click HERE

Couple images

I was thinking like the Wave House in San Diego, this thing is huge! Gnarly

It's almost like hitting ramps vs dirt lips, this wave is very consistent and you take out some variables.

"this thing is huge! Gnarly"

Thats what i was thinking!! what do you think the cost of all this is?

Here is another one from back in 2015 in NSW AUS. Looks way shorter?

*ya i cant sleep and im tripping on this technology

Have no idea why I am blown away by this...never even touched a surf board. Something about recreating a wave and placing in the middle of farm land just blows my mind.

OC - that one in Europe really got the ball rolling a few years ago. That same technology is used at a new place in Austin, TX called NLand. It just opened earlier this year and I actually got to surf it as I was in Austin for work about two weeks after they opened!

http://nlandsurfpark.com

But while both the Texas and UK wave pools are light years beyond what there was for wave pools before, both waves have definite imperfections. When i surfed NLand it had a totally different feel than "regular" surfing and it was hard to adjust to at first.

Slaters wave meanwhile, is just perfection. Not sure what their future plans for it are but there have been whispers of franchising and opening more that would be open to the public

Moto - the pool/lake was already there. It was built as a facility for competitive waterskiing and had been inoperative for years.

Kelly and his team had been openly working on the technology for a long time. The company - Kelly Slater Wave Co. has some big time VC $$ people behind it. They weren't messing around. Out of the blue 2 years ago he came out with a video of him surfing it and completely caught the surfing world off guard. It was crazy! Within a few days people managed to track it down haha

http://www.swellnet.com/news/swellnet-dispatch/2015/12/19/blowing-location-slaters-wave-pool

regarding the color, i think it has to do with the depth (the wave pool is shallower than the lake next to it), the lining material at the bottom as well as the necessary chemicals and additives they probably had to add. Where the wave is breaking it's only about 3-4 feet deep.

The NLand park in Texas was delayed at first because local regulators weren't sure how to govern such a unique concept. Originally they said it had to meet all the same water quality standards as a regular man made pool. Eventually they satisfied the powers that be

I have done Typhoon Lagoons wave pool and its fun but Kellys pool is high performance surf . Competition pool. Really cool. The wedge cuts a perfect wave.
Typhoon is still fun but different. It has huge pistons that drop and create a swell. Its a slow mellow waiste high wave. You can choose lefts, rights or peaks. We did 25%L, 25%R, 50% peaks. It takes place after hours and you give them your music to blast concert style while you surf in a 70 plus degree pool. Its pretty dreamlike really. I did it with 4 guys and yoh can have 50 guests. It was about 1500 and a wave came every 90 seconds with a smaller clean up wave trailing for 3 plus hours.
I guess some old guys designed it and surf all night some days.

Looks awesome! But taking out the entire babes in bikinis on the beach portion of the all-natural surf competition I'm not in favor of. Though, taking out the variable of an out-of-nowhere great white shark attack is a plus in my book.

FLmxer wrote:

I have done Typhoon Lagoons wave pool and its fun but Kellys pool is high performance surf . Competition pool. Really cool. The wedge cuts a perfect wave.
Typhoon is still fun but different. It has huge pistons that drop and create a swell. Its a slow mellow waiste high wave. You can choose lefts, rights or peaks. We did 25%L, 25%R, 50% peaks. It takes place after hours and you give them your music to blast concert style while you surf in a 70 plus degree pool. Its pretty dreamlike really. I did it with 4 guys and yoh can have 50 guests. It was about 1500 and a wave came every 90 seconds with a smaller clean up wave trailing for 3 plus hours.
I guess some old guys designed it and surf all night some days.

how cool! That must be a blast to have that place for a few hours with just some friends.

The NLnad wave goes hourly and I caught about 9 or 10 waves in my hour session. I was just starting to get my groove on it when the session was shutting down. Backside was really hard, the wave was deceivingly fast. They limit the open face wave section to 4 (i think) people on each side of the "pier". The wave pushes out into the lagoon and the whitewater reforms for beginners to surf. Its a much different set up than Kellys wave.

I see this taking off with a rail down the pipe so they can do like skateboarders and hit the rail then back onto the wave.

They could call that "Straight Rhythm Surfing" couldn't they.

Melonfan,

Local surfer here down by you and I want to get out to Nland to surf it soon. I'm assuming I'll need more volume in the pool than the ocean considering it's fresh water? I'm thinking of taking a chunky fish or one of my bigger shortboards with more volume. Maybe a chunky epoxy would be ideal for buoyancy? What did you ride there and what are your normal shortboard dimensions?

My friends just surfed it and the footage they sent me did not look very clean. Either Nland doesn't have a moat to let the surface calm down between waves or it gets very windy out there and creates a lot of chop. If I go out there I would hope to get it as clean as this grom at :30, but I hear that's not very likely?

My friends who surfed it said the same thing as you, that it's not like ocean surfing and takes an hour to get the hang of it. I feel the same way about river surfing so we'll see how I do out there.

Slater's pool is dialed. He's got a moat system now and they got the wave frequency down to approx 3 minutes between waves for clean conditions. Being that these pools take millions to build they are going to need some other serious attractions to make it pencil out. I don't see how NLand will be making money anytime soon even with all those people riding the white water. The Coors family invested what, 30 million or something ridiculous to build this? It seems they need to hold large scale events/concerts, alcohol, great food, and many other attractions to make it work. It's not like a ski resort when you have hundreds of people on the mountain at once. They'll figure it out soon, and then surfing will be changed forever with landlocked surfers all over the world.

Old-Man wrote:

I see this taking off with a rail down the pipe so they can do like skateboarders and hit the rail then back onto the wave.

Rails won't mix well with surfboards/fins but here's something else they did as an experiment recently that makes for easy step offs:

Hmmm, I don't know why this link isn't working but go to vimeo and cut/paste this into the search field:

The Floating Platform for Surfers (Surfing Dock, Volcom, Candock and Stab)

You will see a 3min video with a floating dock in the surf. If anyone else can embed it please do.

this one?