A revealing interview with pool co-inventor Adam Fincham…
Okay. The left don’t…suck…but it ain’t no secret the right is the money shot at the Slater-Fincham pool.
Did you ever wonder why?
Is it, despite the planting of trees all around the joint, the prevailing wind that makes it crumble so? Some quirk of water volume or similar?
Earlier today, tech magazine Wired ran an interview with the pool’s co-inventor Adam Fincham, a Research Associate Professor at University of Southern California who has worked with Kelly since 2006 to create a masterpiece of bathymetry on the outskirts of a lousy cotton-farming town four hours north-east of Los Angeles.
Wade through the story and you’ll hit this.
Fincham stops our conversation again to stare at the wave, and I ask him what he’s looking for.
“I don’t want to see too much whitewater coming off the fence there,” he says, pointing to the part of the wave that’s closest to the fence. It’s that left again—a wave peeling to the left of the surfer—barreling toward the south side of the lagoon. Where there should be an unblemished, clean face of a wave, there’s a spray of surf shooting up in the direction of the hydrofoil apparatus.
And…
It’s why he’s still obsessing over it now, that wave that’s showing just a little bit of whitewater where it shouldn’t. Fincham is nowhere to be found when I leave the Surf Ranch in the late afternoon, but there’s a good chance he’s off somewhere staring at that left, the one that’s not yet perfect.
Other notable facts: the pool is filled with fifteen million gallons of water and on a hot day, which ain’t so rare out in Lemoore, a quarter-of-a-million gallons can evaporate.
The pool’s deepest point is nine feet; shallowest is three-and-a-half.
The hydrofoil weighs 10o tons and is covered by tarps so no secrets are revealed and it has solar panels on the top so drones can’t film it.
