"I defy you to watch this video and come away with a mind unchanged."

For a million dollars or thereabouts, well-heeled surfers can buy their way into a private community built around a wave pool surfers are calling the “most high-performance wave in the world.”

The Brazilian developer of Boa Vista Village, a planned community one-and-a-half hours from the madness of the twelve million souls living in São Paulo, has just pulled back the curtain on its American Wave Machines tank that sits in the middle of three residential towers named Malibu, Laguna and Pebble.

It’s real big, six acres or twice the size of the fabled Waco tank, there’s a double air section (“The Double Shot”) and every sorta configuration you can imagine, and plenty you’d never thought of beyond wildest dreams etc.

American Wave Machines call it their most ambitious build, yet.

The wave at six minutes is ridiculous.

In?

Buy here, although it could be a bit of a zoo by the looks of the drawings. 

"Surf trips always seem to surprise me but this one just had a little extra something."

That wild-looking plunger pool in central Queensland is gonna be demolished and rebuilt as a public tank, opening, I’d guess, end of 2024.

The original tank, y’see, was built as a test facility, cheap concrete lined the bottom and the wave-making plunger was only designed to bounce up and down 150,000 times and wasn’t built to commercial specs.

Breakdowns became the stuff of legend,.

When Tim Baker, widely considered to be the best surf journalist in the biz, visited the joint on a press junket he reported,

“There are frequent delays while they tinker with the machinery or attend to glitches in the system. When a crack in the lake’s cement floor begins turning the water from an aqua blue to a muddy brown we are encouraged to help lug rocks from an on-site quarry into a trailer to help plug the cracks.

“By the end of the second day, it appears we may have pushed the Surf Lakes prototype to its limits. There’s a lengthy delay in the afternoon to attend to some mechanical issue, and when we eventually resume, after only a couple of sets, Occy sounds the alarm that something’s not quite right. The large concrete tower that the air compressor sits on top of looks dangerously off kilter. The force of the swells has knocked it off its footings and we are asked to clear the water immediately.”

Anyway, the almost-forty-year-old Puerto Rican Dylan Graves, a favourite of BeachGrit, visited Yeppoon recently.

In this compelling short documentary, he acts out the drama of Surf Lakes for our entertainment; his look, the hair falling to his shoulders, the very good but still accessible surfing, the vivacity, creates the cumulative effect of us all longing to be alongside Dylan Graves chasing pool waves.

Essential



Heavy veined and thick with blood!

Here, we see Mason Ho belly-bang the famous Newport Wedge in a wild showdown that pits Ho’s shuck and jive against the wave’s Hurricane Kay fuelled holes.

Ho, thirty-four, is a whooshing flash among the autumn gloom, leaving spectators’ mouths flapping mutely.

The waves are of a good size, clean, and Baby Pimp Ho, Hawai’s “Queen of Crazy”, who is still lithe despite a summer diet of candied yams, isn’t afraid to go for the “kill shot”.

Heavy veined and thick with blood.

Essential.