Perth's famine of waves set to end with man-made utopia!

In 2016, investment banker Andrew Ross announced a masterplan to dot Australia with a ten-pack of Wavegarden pools, a bullish target he looked like hitting when the first tank opened at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport in 2019 and with a second in Perth a virtual fait accompli.  

Melbourne opened to much celebration from that city’s wave-starved surfers, only for it to be shuttered during the pandemic one year later as that state endured six wretched lockdowns for a total of 262 days, the longest in the world. 

The Perth pool, which was going to be built in the Perth suburb of Alfred Cove and, importantly, a few hundred metres from my parents’ house, was shut down by the state government after local activists claimed bushland and marine reserves would be damaged. 

A few residents who, let’s be frank already had one foot in the grave, also complained it might impact upon their access to the lawn bowls club there, which apparently carried a bit of sway.

Ross and his company Aventuur shifted their focus to a bleak part of Perth called Jandakot, flat, hot, ain’t much there in that part of town except broken dreams, only for it to be suddenly revealed as home to endangered vegetation and the habitat of the almost extinct black cockatoo. 

Now, after investigation, submissions etc, the Environmental Protection Authority has said the vegetation is already degraded so, fuck it boys, y’might as well bring in the bulldozers. 

“The vegetation has been impacted by historical clearing and ongoing degrading processes leading to large proportion of weeds and limited canopy connectivity,” said the EPA.”The vegetation is of low to moderate quality foraging habitat for Black Cockatoos.”

The tank takes up fourteen acres and thirteen of ‘em have to be cleared, including “3.15ha of Banksia Woodlands, a state-listed priority ecological community.”

To offset the demolition of the Banksia Woodlands, the developer Aventuur will buy 44 acres of Banksia Woodland on the Swan Coastal Plain and give it to the state in a modern-day version of the Catholic Church selling indulgences, same sort theory as carbon credits and so on. 

The tank set-up looks pretty wild, elevated walkways around the pool, caravans around the perimeter mimicking Slater’s set-up at Surf Ranch and a low-rise building which may or may not have been designed by an architect overlooking the familiar wedge-shaped pool.

If you live in Perth, this’ll change your life while simultaneously melting your credit card.

Building starts later this year, we’re told, with gates opening in 2025, 

“My mate said he thought my board had snapped because of the sound but then I realised it had been my shin!”

If it ain’t a Great White coming atcha from below, eyes dead, jaws ready to cleave you in two, now it’s jacked seals turning surfers into bottom bitches.

Cornwall’s Nathan Phillips,  “a local surfing legend”, was shredding at Porthleven, one of the best waves around, last Friday when a seal started giving him heat as he paddled back out.

The animal pulled on his leash, whiplashing his board into his stilt, breaking it in two.

Phillips, forty two and standing six-five in high-heels, was then too big to squeeze into the Air Ambulance and was forced to lay in “stinking” water inhaling a “cocktail of antibiotics”.

“I had just been paddling out and something started tugging on my leash,” he told Walesonline. “It kind of freaked me out because I didn’t know what it was. After I worked out that it was a seal and fended it off, it was just playing I think, but a wave then crashed down on me just after at a weird angle and sent my board flying into my shin.

“I remembered my mate saying he thought my board had snapped because of the sound – but then I realised it had been my shin when I felt my foot hitting the back of my leg. I just started screaming with pain, and my mate dragged me onto his board and told me to start paddling back to shore.”

Phillips is in a Devon hozzy awaiting surgery with his leg pinned by a metal frame.

A GoFundMe has been set up etc.

“He’s currently on morphine waiting for surgery so the least we could do would be to set up a page to try and raise some money for him,” said his pal Alec. “Him and his partner are expecting their next child in only a few weeks too, so it’s not the best time.”

As for seals,

“We do get a lot of ’em down here in Cornwall and they do try and play with you or mess about with you a bit sometimes.”

"This isn’t just something that they do by mistake. They’re very calculated."

It’s yet another curio of the animal kingdom that Orcas enjoy eating the fatty and delicious hearts and livers of Great White sharks.

In a technical sense, it’s impressive how the Orca gets to their favoured organ. They make a small tear near the liver or heart and suck the son of a bitch out.

The method is as surgical as it is gruesome. 

“When they come in after they’ve debilitated a shark, whether that’s a ‘karate chop’ or ramming, then they tend to try and flip it upside-down, and that induces tonic immobility, and then the shark basically becomes catatonic, and it’ll just lie there,” explains Doctor Ingrid Visser, who founded the Orca Research Trust in 1998.

“And at that stage the Orca will come in, and they’ll typically grab it from the pectoral fin, then they’ll give it a good shake — viciously, violently, very, very hard — and when you’re underwater you can actually hear the shark ripping, and it sounds like Velcro being ripped apart.

“And then they’re going for the liver, and that’s the real thing they’re targeting — it’s the liver that they’re after.”

It’s the heavyweight showdown of the marine kingdom, says Visser. 

“When you look at how an apex predator like an Orca hunts another apex predator, you see that they think about this, this isn’t just something that they do by mistake. They’re very calculated, they’re very cautious, and sometimes even when it’s a sure thing they’ll come in very slowly.”

It’s a surprise to learn that killing a Great White shark isn’t that hard. These peerless, top-of-the-chain tanks are just as vulnerable as the surfers, the swimmers and the scuba divers they’re suddenly killing with unprecedented regularity.

And you can do it! 

Just make a rope lasso. Let the fish swim through the noose and when the rope passes those iconic, collectable, priceless jaws and just before it reaches the dorsal fin, pull tight.

Four, maybe five minutes, and the White is dead. Hanged.

“Get ’em on the hook and they go neanderthal,” says a shark fisherman who wisely prefers anonymity and asks that I don’t reveal his home port. “Use a powerhead and if you hit the wrong spot the spot the shark’s going to take off with half its face blown off. Of course, the lasso method ain’t perfect, either. Use the wrong people and they can get dragged over the side.”

Illegal in most places, of course.