Local council says yes! Build a tank!
A few days ago,Wavegarden released a photo of their rebooted tank called The Cove. The tightly cropped image features a man bent double and squished into a one-foot tube.
“This surfer is Spaniard Hodei Collazo – he’s six foot tall / 180cm just to put the barrel into context!” reads the press release.
If the photo was meant to make us all drunk on visions of their new pool and gently threaten the superiority of the as yet critically unexamined Slater tank it failed.
An email-interview with Andrew Ross, the Australian investor who has a noble plan to seed his home country with ten Wavegardens was further comedy.
“I had 65 waves in about an hour with a few other guys – was hard to walk afterwards,” Ross told Surfing Life. “One of the wave types includes a true barrelling wave, with a trough and a concave shape, that means the wave wraps back at you like a point break. This is different to the current wave foil tech where the wave is somewhat convex shaped, in that it bends back away from you as it breaks. I surfed the new full-scale ‘Cove’ in December, and it is awesome!”
But what Wavegarden has got that the Slater and the as-yet-to-be-built Webber pools don’t (although expect a large-ish announcement in a fortnight, Webber tells me), is real-life testing. In Wales and in Texas.
Of course, the results haven’t been entirely pretty. Wales closed for a one-million-and-a-half dollar reboot and Texas has been shuttered for more than six months.
It’d be churlish to be too hard on the technology, I think. At least it’s out there. It’s happening. And who doesn’t want a pool to shred on?
And, now, it appears the Wavegarden in the Perth suburb of Melville is a step closer after the local council approved a ground lease for a slice of Tompkins Park.
Whatever you think of pools, this’ll add a little something to a park that butts up against a shallow slice of the Swan River and, right now, has a lawn bowls club and a couple of shitty houses on it.
The pool, if it gets built, and the ifs are plenty, you’ll be able to surf against the backdrop of a setting sun and the surprisingly muscular Perth skyline.
And Perth, which is in the shadow of offshore islands and never gets waves of any real value, needs a tank. If it barrels, nice, if it don’t, it doesn’t matter.
I grew up in the joint. I know.
The poor bastards are dying for this.