CityWave gonna squeeze a wavepool into your office or store for under five mill!
Almost two years ago, I wrote of my excitement for CityWave and its interpretation of the modern wavepool. The Munich-based operation has applied the physics of a standing wave to the creation of its tanks, a little like Tom Lochtefeld’s FlowRider, but deep enough so you’re not riding finless discs.
It ain’t no surprise that the river wave, the Eisbach, is in the same town as CityWave.
Oh it’s a wave that will whip you out! Much riding, not so much sitting.
This morning, the sporting goods store L & T in Osnabrück, a city in north-west Germany, opened a CityWave that had been installed in the middle of its store.
Tell me that ain’t fun. Showing everyone in town your cutback and chop-hop prowess. The size and portability of the tank means you could, theoretically, throw one in an office or a slightly bigger-than-average backyard.
The American face of CityWave, the former world number two Shane Beschen, daddy to two rippers Koda, twelve, and Noah, seventeen, has been riding the tanks for the past four years.
“We all went to Munich four winters in a row, each time for five days, and honestly, it’s what motivated me to jump fully in, business wise. Because I’d watch my kids, who live in Hawaii and who are used to surfing good waves, get so stoked. In the middle of fucking Germany!”
Beschen says there’ll be a fully operational CityWave within the US sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months. He calls it a “patience game”, getting the money, the land, the approvals. But it’s getting very close. “Now we’re seeing successful investment companies, real estate companies looking into this. When that happens, it becomes a real thing.”
Instead of the usual ten-metre wide pool, Beschen says he wants to build the US version three times as wide as the German tanks.
“On the ten-metre wide pools you’re going pretty fast by the time you get to the side and have to turn. If you continued another ten or twenty metres you’d be capable of a lot more. We’ll see a massive revolution when we build ’em that wide.”
Which means, big airs off the coping instead of roundhouse cutbacks, which is the bread and butter of CityWave and which you can’t do on Wavegardens or at the Surf Ranch.
Another advantage of CityWave, and yeah there are disadvantages too, like, it’s not going to feel like Snapper or little Kirra (Surf Ranch) or Aragum Bay (Wavegarden), is there’s hardly any down time. You’re not sitting in flat water waiting for the wake to settle before another wave arrives.
Beschen says each session will be forty-five minutes long with ten other surfers. “It’s like…hours… in the ocean as far as actual riding,” he says. “It’s a crazy workout. As soon as someone blows it another person is riding. Within that forty-five minute session you’re getting three to four minutes of riding. Your legs are throbbing.”
The CityWave costs around one-sixth of a Surf Ranch or Wavegarden, which adds to the likelihood of ’em actually happening.
“A complete facility, with retail, a bar, is in the five million dollar range,” he says. “You’re on half-an-acre at most. All other products are on five or ten acres. We can penetrate the dense suburban market. The bigger facilities will always be on the outskirts.”
And to the pitchfork-wielding luddites who fear the pool?
“Once people start riding ’em and having fun, they’ll realise it’s just an alternative,” says Beschen. “A lot of people are getting hung up on this or that. To me surfing is… everything. It’s surfing rivers, surfing behind boats, surfing Backdoor.”
Watch recently retired three-time world champion Mick Fanning on a CityWave from last September.
