Tom Lochtefeld’s Palm Springs Surf Club wavepool a miracle of genius and inspiration!

At Palm Springs Surf Club, every door is a back door!

Yesterday, after a cursory glance at a couple of YouTube clips doin’ the rounds following the debut of the new Palm Springs Surf Club’s full-sized tank, I mighta likened it to a slightly slicker version of Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon.

Readers, very wrong, oh so wrong.

And, here, I want to bunch my fingers and twirled them about old man Lochtefeld’s knob and correct the record.

First, about Tom Lochtefeld.

There’s no bigger name in the wavepool game than San Diego’s Thomas J Lochtefeld, the former tax lawyer turned water park proprietor turned creator of surf dreams.

Lochtefeld got his surf chops threading caves at Big Rock in La Jolla, San Diego, and has spent the last forty years trying to recreate similar thrills at the punch of a button.

In 1987, he sold his share in a bunch of theme parks for two million dollars and used that cash, as well the sale of his beachfront joint at La Jolla for 950k to create a standing wave, called Flowrider, that ended up being installed in over 200 joints in thirty-five countries.

In 1999, the Swiss watch company Swatch toured a souped up version of the Flowrider called Bruticus Maximus and that caused more permanent injuries in one year than Teahupoo in the last thirty, around the world: from Florence to Munich, Vienna, Hanover, Long Beach, San Diego, Manila and Sydney, with Tony Hawke, Kelly Slater, Chris Miller and Terje Haakonsen wowing crowds with a surf, snow, skate combo of airs and tubes.
Lochtefeld’s real goal, however, was a wave that didn’t involve standing waves and finless mini-boards.

As computer tech got better, he deepened his research on the different ways of making waves: hydraulics, ploughs, boats.

Four years ago he told me and Chas about the Palm Springs Surf Club pool.

“It’s going to be an A-frame so you can backdoor it.”

God, he was right.

This twenty-five minutes cut of the full-sized Palm Beach Surf Club, below, starts slow.

But watch as Caity Simmers, Sierra Kerr, Jackie Doz, Blair Conklin, the ugly Coffin brother and Italo backdoor the wildest, bluest wedge you could ever imagine, and all amid the joyous roars from a crowd intoxicated with a well-earned victory.

Essential.