Greg Webber's long-awaited wavepool only six weeks away from breaking dirt!

Earlier today, on the generally very good and mercifully sober website, swellnet, it was reported that Greg Webber’s first wavepool was six weeks away from breaking dirt at a secret Gold Coast location.

(Phew, long sentence.)

“The structural and mechanical enginnering is already under way,” said Greg, “while the civil work, the excavation of the lagoon, begins in six weeks.”

The long-awaited pool would be three hundred metres long by one hundred and fifty metre wide and, said Greg, an American licensee, Ocean Sports Development, “have just signed an exclusive agreement with Sports Facilities Advisory (SFA) with roll out imminent across the country.”

Read the rest of that story here, although you’ll quickly realise I’ve bitten most of the meat off the bone.

I was very hurt that I didn’t get the exclusive to the story as I’ve known Greg for a very long time and have been, mostly, kind in my reporting. Every few days for the last six months I would send a text message that read, “Any news?” or “How’s the pool?”, sometimes with decorative emoji.

The first I knew of this story was an email from Greg that read, “Guess you saw the swellnet post. I’ve owed him priority for over two years.”

Why?

“I made a promise after he did the patent story between kelly and I.”

Heartbreaking, yes, but also heartwarming as loyalty is such a rare commodity.

Now let’s examine the new pool, closely. The difference, says Greg, between his and Kelly and Wavegarden is theres is a soliton pool, his is kelvin. 

(More about that in a subsequent post, when Greg completes lunch.)

And Greg’s will be better, he says, because it has a superior wave rate (a pool has to be commercial), a trough (“You don’t travel the world looking for flat-faced waves,” says Webber) and the ability for the wave to be… customised.

“If you can’t make ridiculous distortions it’s going to get boring. You just can’t provide an A, B and C model. Customising is critical. If you can make a wave go from half-a-metre to two-and-a-half metres in five seconds, that’s a ridiculous distortion. It doesn’t happen in nature. And if you can actually create bulges and lumps and backdoors that you can see coming in towards you, but you haven’t ridden that wave before, that degree of random is going accentuate the whole experience. Before my pool’s done no one will realise how vital it is to throw some shit at people so that you’re never aware of what’s going to happen next.”

Wavegarden, says Webber, will “end up being redundant. They’d be horrified at what Kelly did and and even more fucking horrified when I build my one. (But) only one is going to make money. My one. There’s only one design and it revolves around using the Kelvin wake. It allows us to do 500 waves an hour as a base rate. We can have a ride rate of 5000 rides per hour. That’s fucked up. That’s proper money.”

And let’s talk irony, briefly. All the huffing and puffing over Wavegarden in Perth and Melbourne and Sydney and not one dirtied spade.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if Greg, who has promised a pool for years, opens his doors first.