"When Kelly thinks about what is being done in his
name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an environmentalist
looking back at him?"
Ever since the looming Jeep Surf Ranch Pro stuck its
head around the corner, sick notes and reasons of absence forms
have been hitting WSL email addresses with the
relentlessness of Qassam rockets bound for Ashkelon.
Julian Wilson, wanted to think about the Olympics for six weeks
and there ain’t no chance he’s decamping to Tachi Palace and
surfing the tank.
Jordy Smith, out, knee injury, although the six-three beast is
no fan of the pool, says it’s “predictable” and “really not that
exciting to the viewers after watching the tenth surfer go back
into the barrel for another ten seconds.”
John John Florence, Kolohe Andino, Michel Bourez and gals Tyler
Wright, Lakey Peterson, Bronte Macaulay, Macy Callaghan.
All out.
Brazil used to be the black sheep of the tour, injuries,
apparently catastrophic before the contest repairing magically soon
after.
After last year’s event, BeachGrit’s tour reporter
Steve “Longtom” Shearer, jerkerd awake long enough to pull his head
out of his pretzel bowl and write,
We’re five years into this thing now.
Five long years.
The gap between the rhetoric, that tubs were going to loose
a tsunami of radical innovative surfing, and the reality,
conservative surfing, is becoming clearer every day. It’s become
what Orwell termed the “inadmissible fact.” It’s put us in upside
down world, where Chris Cote, when he hears the train says, “ This
never gets old” means “there’s something deeply wrong here but I
can’t dare acknowledge it”.
Five years.
Can someone on the pro wavepool side of the argument explain
to me why, given the basic repeatability of the wave, some new
trick is not conceived, mastered and then executed to a stunned
judging panel ala vert skating or snowboard half-pipe?
Wasn’t that the whole point?
On a recent post featuring the seven-time world champion
Stephanie Gilmore at the tank, WSL fans wrote,
Snooze. Throw in the air section.
Most uninteresting event on tour. Every time I see this wave
I keep scrolling.
Good for training, horrible for contest. RIP WSL.
Soooooooo booooring.
Same commentary on every wave… stick to mother
ocean.
And so on.
**********
It’ll be six years, this December, when Kelly unveiled
the tank, a miracle of technology and vision, a wave so
perfect most thought it was a prank. Better than anything before it
or, if flawless points are your thing, since.
It would be the lavishly tanned eleven-time world champ’s final
legacy; his gift to surfing, a facsimile of Little Marley, the
draining sandbottom right-hander that runs across Rainbow
Bay.
And here we are, 2021, years after Kelly sold the biz to the WSL
and besides the Lemoore prototype not a single Slater pool has been
built.
The Israeli-German-Basque Wavegarden tech has flourished, fully
functioning commercial pools in Melbourne, Switzerland, England,
Brazil.
American Wave Machines has Texas and Japan tanks, more to
follow.
Same with Tommy Lochtefeld’s Surf Loch, one under construction
in Palm Springs, a few privates kicking around, more coming.
City Wave, the German bidder of stationary pools, notably represented by Shane
Beschen in the US, has ‘em indoors, outdoors, in the US,
Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Russia and
Israel.
The closest a Slater pool has to its first commercial pool is a
$1.2 billion development on
on 510-hectares, or 1200 acres, of “highly constrained land” near
the Queensland beach town of Coolum. The proposal
includes a Surf Ranch wrapped in a 20,000-person stadium, a
six-star eco-resort, restaurants, bars, a retail village and “an
environmental education centre based on the site’s wetlands and
nearby waterways.”
The WSL’s Andrew Stark said the local surfing community was
“ecstatic and excited.”
It’s as far away from being built in 2021 as it was two years
ago,
I sent Longtom to investigate in 2019.
I put boots on the ground at the site. I know this country
very well. It’s in my blood. My people come from the Queensland
cane swamps. They are Danes, Swedes, Sicilians.
Practical people.
They would understand the necessity of bulldozing the bush
to make way for jobs. But I do not. The developer’s eye eludes me.
I see trees and bush. Birds, insects, frogs. I feel sad that
surfers will be the ones behind the bull-dozers, erasing this
wildlife, this bush from history.
From what I can see though, although there is ambivalence,
distrust and even hostility to the Coolum wave pool development,
that is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.
The greenwashing on the project will be immense. Next
level.
But I wonder, when Kelly thinks about what is being done in
his name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an
environmentalist looking back at him?
From a miracle conjured out of nowhere and greeted with
universal acclaim to the tour’s most hated event and a wavepool
tech used nowhere.
Why?
Why?
The Jeep Surf Ranch Pro starts this Friday and runs through
Sunday.
