Want to see what Slater's mythical pool looks like
when you attach a GoPro to a kite?
When Kelly Slater loosed his
10-years-in-the-making-pool to the world in December, it
threw more questions than it answered.
Was it really the greatest leap in the history of surfing in
tanks? Was this a precursor to the mythical level playing field
that would make surfing an Olympic sport?
Where was it?
And, if you were a bird, what did the setup look like? I could
guess at the first two, Reddit filled in the blanks on the third,
but… the setup?
A month ago, I organised a pilot to fly BeachGrit’s LA
bureau (Chas Smith, actually more Cardiff-by-the-Sea than Los
Angeles) to Lemoore and to film and photograph. Those damn El Niño
temperatures, hovering around freezing for most of Jan, meant he
couldn’t fly. And we couldn’t film.
But, this morning, LA surfer Keith Plocek filled in the blanks
on his blog with the beautifully perfect title:
I Flew a Kite Near Kelly Slater’s Artificial Wave
and Scored Aerial Photos of Surfing’s Future
Because it was Saturday
A few weeks ago, Mr Plocek had rigged the kite he’d bought from
New Zealand with a GoPro and a Picavet stablisation system he’d 3-D
printed, and loosed it above the pool.
Let’s examine his story.
The typical
surf-trip story begins with getting there, so let’s start with Tim
and me, three weeks ago, bouncing down the 5 in my beat-up
Jeep.
We’re heading up to
Lemoore, California, 110 miles from the coast — not exactly the
place you’d expect to find good waves. The Jeep is many things, and
one of them is loud, so I’m yelling our mission to Tim:
We’re going to drive up
to King’s County. We’re going to attach a GoPro camera to a kite.
We’re going to come back with aerial footage of a man-made
lake.
Why? Because it’s
Saturday. Also, that lake has the potential to change the essence
of surfing forever.
Last month professional surfer Kelly Slater released a video of
the perfect artificial wave, created by his wave company, and the
surfing community went nuts. Online sleuths tracked down the wave
pool’s possible location in a matter of days. Surfers started
posting accounts of driving up to the Central Valley and hanging
around the outside of the compound. They all brought boards,
hopeful Slater would emerge like Willy Wonka and invite them
inside.
Mostly they just got stuck in the mud.
Slater’s people remained silent when asked about the lake’s
location. They were mum on the science too. Everyone assumed the
lake in Lemoore was the spot, but outdated pics from Google Maps
were the only aerial proof.
That’s where Tim and I came in. Tim’s from New Zealand, so he’s
born to fly kites, and I like to find new ways to tell stories. We
could’ve brought a drone, but that seemed much less fun.
It’s kind of hard to hate on a kite.
On the way up the 5, we kept monitoring wind speeds on our
smartphones— just like we’d check a surf report when heading
towards the coast. The forecast was good. We talked about surfing.
We stared at the road.
After bouncing on the highway for three hours, we took a right
and soon rolled past a security guard standing outside a compound
with a high fence. We’d made it. But there was no wind at
all.
It was flat.
We’d driven all the way out there, and it was flat.
We weren’t going near that fence. We didn’t even want to get
close enough to cause trouble. We just wanted an aerial shot from
afar. But we had no wind.
Before they’d even tracked down the possible location of
Slater’s perfect artificial wave, surfers were already arguing
about what it meant for the sport. Would kooks in Utah never even
learn how to duck-dive? Where was the magic, the sense of
discovery? Without nature’s whims, was surfing even surfing?
I don’t have answers to those questions, but I can say we were
inspired that day. If the world’s greatest surfer can invent his
own wave, we’d have to invent our own wind.
Liftoff!
We took a couple left turns and wound up on a muddy road behind
the compound. Tim and I went to work putting down the Jeep’s top
and prepping the kite, as if we’d done it a thousand times
before.
I shifted the Jeep into gear, and Tim let the kite go. Mud flew in
the air. So did the kite.
We were airborne, shooting video, barreling towards an unlikely
place for surfing’s future. I’m not sure when I started
giggling, but it was hard to stop. We made two passes at the
compound, yanked in the kite and drove away. Fifteen minutes later
we watched the footage from a parking lot in town. We’d done
it.
We’d nabbed the first aerial photo of the lake. No one was
there — the lake was placid — but that didn’t matter. Our goal was
to contribute just a little to the surfing community’s knowledge,
and we had succeeded.
To my eyes there is no question Lemoore is the spot— all the
landmarks from the video are there. But I’ll leave the final
conclusions to the online detectives.
I had a great Saturday.
(Visit Keith Plocek’s site here…)
