“It’s so big! It’s so deep! It doesn’t look real!” says 1999 world champion Occ.
Right now, like right now, a sturdy contingent of WQS-level Australian pro surfers are swinging their stakes in the Occy and Barton Lynch-endorsed wave pool called Surf Lakes.
The pool had its first official test run yesterday, with Occy and his son Jay riding the opening wave at Occy’s Peak; Barton Lynch rode the A-Frame and got a small barrel on the left.
Other surfers arriving to test the pool include Mitch Crews, Flick Palmateer, Conner O’Leary, Laura Enever, the fantastic super kid Dakoda Walters from Angourie and, possibly, Joel Parkinson and Dean Morrison later today.
Surf Lakes is a a full-sized demonstration model located midway between the Queensland towns of Yeppoon and Rockhampton and uses a giant plunger to create waves, unlike the sled-foil combo of the Slater pool and Wavegarden and the air pressure game of American Wave Machines.
“We had our first waves yesterday but we’re not at 100 percent capacity yet. We at around forty percent,” says media director and former Tracks magazine editor Wayne Dart, who says the first waves were two, maybe three foot. “We’re analysing all the numbers, making sure we can get it to full size and not break it, essentially. But, this afternoon, there’ll be waves that are overhead. From an engineering perspective, all the numbers are matching. We’re confident it will handle full-tilt.”
I say to Dart that it sounds a little Apollo mission-esqe, pushing the technology into the unknown, risking catastrophic breakdowns, and so forth.
“Walk around the actual structure and it actually feels like a rocket launcher,” he says.
Dart says the technology, the jumbo plunger, has exceeded expectations.
It’s surreal. You look at the footage and it looks like an artist’s impression. You’ve got trees and mountains in the background and this crystal clear green wave breaking down the line.”
“Mate, it was unbelievable. The thing is mind-blowing. Everything about it. The technology and just the sheer beauty of the backdrop and surrounds. It’s surreal. You look at the footage and it looks like an artist’s impression. You’ve got trees and mountains in the background and this crystal clear green wave breaking down the line.”
Is it a noisy son of a bitch?
“The movement of the plunger is dead silent but there’s engine noise from the generators. In a full commercial model you can configure it so there’s no noise at all. And if you use renewable energy, it’d be silent.”
Has it got a filter or do you not fear the brain-gobbling amoeba?
“We’re chlorinating the water, with pool guys testing it every day so it meets regulations.”
There are four waves in the pool: the A-Frame, Occy’s Peak, a beachbreak-style wave and “further around, a wave that stands up on this ledge and rifles down the line. We’ll get to that one today.”
Footage gets loosed on Monday.
Hoo-ee etc.
(Watch a short film from earlier this year as the pool neared completion.)
Let’s just end this and put the facts on the table. After a decade of working in the design world designing everyone else’s high budget bullshit I started Doubles out of my garage in May screen printing shirts and skateboards and doing paraffin wax for the traditionalists. I’m 38 and have been playing in bands and screen printing my own posters and shirts and booking tours since I was 18. I released the brand with surf zines, logo stickers, shirts and wax at the 8Ball Art Book Fair in LA this past June. I met Noa’s buddy Delone Isaacs (the RVCA, RAEN, and RAGETM photographer) at that event. I was / am a fan of his work and gave him the Double Smiley stickers and some wax etc. I’m not putting blame on Delone but since basically day one for us, our shit has been in their radius.
Fast forward to July after Joel discovered my stuff. Being that Joel and I were already friends that surfed together, he wanted to support me and be a part of it. We partnered and have been jamming on projects and ideas ever since.
Since then many friends in the industry of Joel’s, mine, and Noa’s have received a Double Smiley T-shirt and some wax, as foot in the door just getting awareness out there. There are pictures and all showing affiliated parties / team managers etc. across the dinner table from someone wearing the Doubles shirt who they are on the same trip with. It’s just too small of a world. Joel and I blame it on the art directors. In the surf world there are so many of these people out there who are gifted their job by way of their circle friends and not talent. They get a job and have to feed corporate surf company quotas on product line’s graphics. They just look for what they think is roots out there in the Surf World, which is slim to none, and copy it the safest way they can. They work like any other company that uses a style forecaster business to tell them what’s cool.
Now as far as the “Doubles is the color version of FORMER” comment goes…. LORD don’t get me started. If you aren’t 14 and have been around a decade or two you would remember the brand out of Costa Mesa called COMUNE that was started by the founder of Analog after they sold to Pac Sun. COMUNE was a decade ahead of it’s time and it didn’t last in it’s original form. I even did multiple graphics for COMUNE T-Shirts under their DROP CITY artists label back in 2009 / 2010 because they liked the art work of my band at the time. There’s this ongoing cycle of appropriating DIY art and music culture into the Surf industry without giving any credit to the source. FORMER ART DIRECTION AND PRODUCT DESIGN IS A CARBON COPY OF COMUNE, just a bunch of watered down Joy Division record covers done by Costa Mesa / LA surf scene’ster art directors well in the know of COMUNE. Funny story though is that FORMER is not free of this sort of poaching. The new Dane Monster Children cover and art work is done by one of my best friends who’m I have known for over a decade through our bands and surfing in NYC. The way Dane and he connected was that the FORMER art director’s stole one of the songs of his band PC Worship and used it throughout the first blow out video campaign for FORMER. Props to Dane though because when he found out via getting called out on instagram around Aug / Sept 2017 maybe? He got ahold of Justin immediately and has sense tried to do anything he could to help him, like having his band play the acid test shows / giving him the cover of Monster Children. Dane is also lucky that Justin is a core surfer since day one and that he gave Dane the benefit of the doubt because Dane is a good dude, regardless of his naive trust in his art directors. They are tight buds now and that’s how that shit should go down.
It’s not Noa, it’s the tired ass art directors that are ripping all of us surf’n art nerds and musicians off. Joel knows this and he knows what is real. That’s why he wanted to be part of what I was doing. We want to give something authentic back to the groms and run something cool out of San Diego.
At least in the pro spectrum there are people like Jason Dill in this world who run companies like Fucking Awesome and painstaking produce all of the artwork for the their brand.
As far as Shawn Stussy, I fucking love Shawn Stussy. He’s a legend and an idol to me. He just happens to have a name with two Ss and we drew up a logo that was a Double smile. Case closed.
My thoughts exactly. As a 46 year old native of America’s Penis (Florida), Slater was as formative to my youth as masturbation. Well almost anyway. Black and White, Momentum, etc etc…it was as natural as breathing to root for him all the way through his last world title. Never a reason to even question my allegiance, its just what I (we) did.
Now I’m hoping he comes back next year just so I can watch him lose in round 2 every event except maybe in pumping barrels so I can laugh at him yak some faux existential tripe about what “the Universe” is telling him, how it’s just a farewell tour and he’s not concerned about results, just living in the moment etc.
I too hope his wave pool fails. Maybe being made to feel you’re the center of the universe and the gilded apple of the collective eye since one’s youth plays a big role in creating tool-like tendencies. Maybe he was always this way but all the many other former devotees like myself who have soured on him were previously too blinded in our allegiance to notice.
Funny how I take the time to explore the intricacies of this as if it’s important. Maybe I’m simply seeing all the things I loathe about myself in Slater. After all, as the saying goes, “you spot it, you got it!”. I’ll never call anyone or anything gay again.
But just so there’s no confusion, I like football, beer, and bitches. Wanna fight?
Some a few arvo’s a week
About as interesting as watching occy snort a line of coke ya seen it once seen it a thousand times.
Occ look’s like the 40-something tradie first-timer everyone on the job site’s leery of letting use power tools.
I don’t know ? He is the genetic offspring of an Italian born civil engineer . He got concrete in the blood ?
Possibly. I was on an electrical testing course yesterday where the bloke in charge* said if you can’t get your head around the concept of ‘active = blue, negative = brown, green/yellow = earth’, “you should become a concretor, it would be safer for everyone”.
*get it?
The charge of the light and sometimes not so bright brigade . Took me years to take the power back after a ten year sojourn through the labyrinth of the electrical installation industry .
Using plunger-tech is smart because it will keep the poo from clogging the waves.
After my initial reaction of ” wow, cool, amazing, can’t wait fore the video etc” I’ve realised that I’ve already reached peak wavepool interest. It’s starting to get a little boring now, and I suspect the yawns are going to get louder very soon. It’s been really exciting until now and lots of fun, but…
[this is the sound of me not clicking on any more wavepool-related articles]
What WILL keep interesting me is the (imagined? over-hyped?) drama behind the competing wavepool interests and their business model assumptions that could collapse spectacularly at any minute. Fortunately we still have a long way to go before we reach peak Schadenfreude
i had a similar reaction when i realised that this story is ‘a wave pool will open’, not ‘a wave pool has opened and here is footage of it’. i still hate myself enough to watch a wave or two when the video bumps into the internet though.
I will undoubtedly also wallow in self-hate when the video drops.
We are all collectively Pavlov’s dog
Natural Surfer
Will be the Waterman tag
Of Twenty Thirty
Organic waterman.
Or Free Range surfer, as opposed to Caged.
That right there is goofy discrimination my friend.
hashtag: naturalprivelege hashtag: metoo
And they still can, ha hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha I think this is one of the better jokes that was played on the surf community
20 years ago, if you said in the future they will be selling $4 bottles of water…
They found a hard hat to fit occys head and work boots with loose enough elastic sides to fit over his kankles !
Wow, that is amazing…
Is this going to be “head high” For Keanu Asing or “head high” For Owen. The jury is in on Monday.
They found one for Munga, there’s room for Occ too
I reckon the wall in the background is just run of the mill timber paling fence which would make this wave a 3 incher.
Yeah that lip makes my dick look thick, and that’s no mean feat!
That coincedentaly is also why I never use fence paneling on my bedroom walls.
Seems they have used the same creative set design genius responsible for the WSL post show’s drift woody ambience ?
Early proto, not the full-sizer pumping out dreams as I type!
Batchy Crib ,his name is Conn( o )r O’Leary.
It’s just a flood in the Bunnings timber yard toilet cubicle.
FWIW, according to their web site it’s a 1:5 scale prototype from last year.
Any idea if they will open this one to the public or just a demo?
Just a demo I believe
Soon; natural line-ups will be empty as the hordes flock to the new pools.
Joy, oh JOY!
Don’t bet on it , unless everyone has 2 to 3 hundred dollars of expendable cash each week to blow on the tank
Problem is people have to wait for the waves to be generated in the wavepools AND wait their turn so it’ll only at best make a miniscule difference to crowds at the good breaks.
And you guys really thought at one time Kelly was going to open his pool to the public and share it with the world hahahahahahahaha, hahahaha
Cant wait to hear Webber tell us how this one sucks too,an his is the best pool ever (to never be made )
Ancient alienate theorists suggest that Barton Lynch is in fact not going to let Occy forget who got the first barrel at Occy’s wave lake.
O2 those northsiders have been throwing shade on us southsiders since midget was a boy .
The Occumentary scene where Barton describes feeling no remorse making Occy cry in the water at the OP Pro is so damn funny, ruthlessly cheap, and quintessential Barton character.
I love them both but have a feeling history will cherish Cronulla’s lovable flawed artistic rogue over the otherside’s smiling assassin .
Looking forward to watching them take the err, plunge.