Two weeks to build, comes in big box, stick it on lake or river!
Want a portable wave tank? Twenty-five metres long, thirteen wide? Drag it anywhere, takes two weeks to assemble (the parts come in a container), use river water, lake water whatever and it costs something like a hundred bucks a day in electricity to run?
Zero water consumption, low power bills?
Now that sounds like a biz that works.
Lately, you might’ve got the feeling that wave pools are the new arms race.
It’s the Slater-Finchim tank vs Webber vs American Wave Machines vs Wavegarden vs Surf Lakes and so on. Each pool slightly different, each with its own imitation of ol’ ma nature.
Who’ll win? Who’ll be dashed upon the rocks of insolvency? Will all of ’em prove to be monstrous white elephants, destined to become creepy concrete pits when the surfers don’t come?
A slightly different angle on the game are the German companies, City Wave and Unit Park Tech. The Germans are into the standing wave model, the sort pioneered by the American Tom Lochtefeld and his Flowrider. Tom’s been in the game since the eighties, opening that first Flowrider in Texas in 1991. He knows the central problem to wavepools. They cost too much to build, and way too much to run.
And the Germans, who usually get their first taste of surf riding stationary river waves, aren’t adverse to the idea of this kinda tank.
The Unit Surf Pool, by Unit Park Tech, is, according to the PR, “a floating surf pool construction that brings a surfable deepwater wave to any body of standing water… it operates on a natural body of water which translates to an endless water supply and no need for chemical water treatment.
It’s a good sell.
The first commercial version is at a joint called Surf Langenfeld between Dusseldorf and Cologne where the Unit Park Tech HQ is (history lesson: Cologne was one of the heaviest bombed cities in World War II, almost the entire population evaporated or evacuated).
Now, you’re not going to detour to Germany to jump on the damn thing, in case you’re wondering it’s 34 Euro an hour to ride, but it does show there’s a quick-to-build, cheap alternative to the magnificent $20 million-plus structures being shopped around.
Watch here.