Stage one of the old Wet 'n' Wild site's rebuild is sweeter than a jasmine mist coating your face like a fine desert sweat.
Ain’t nothing bad about a three-foot wedge built in the loving arms of a desert one hundred miles west* of Los Angeles.
It don’t rain, it don’t get cold and it ain’t Waco where you stay in broken-down tin shacks with red velvet curtains and the ghosts of David Koresh and his seventy-five white Christian brothers and sisters, incinerated by the FBI just one mile up the road on Mount Carmel, tapping on your window in the dark of night.
This is stage one of Cheyne Magnusson’s rebuild, using the King Jesus of wavepool design Tom Lochtefeld’s tech, at the old Wet ’n’ Wild site in Palm Springs, California.
In a post to his sixteen-thousand followers, let’s call ’em Branch Magnussions, Cheyne wrote, “1/3 the amount of wave generating as BSR. Pool shape untouched since 1980. Less water than every other full scale wave park out there. Still making sections for the boys to go ham on!!! This thing is only half built people, wait till I get double the power.”
It’s the same pool that was used in the opening sequences of North Shore, a film from 1987 that tells the fictional tale of Rick Kane, a boy who learns to surf in a wave pool and then attempts to transpose his skills to Pipeline with mostly good results.
Here Eithan Osborne, Parker Coffin and Ian Crane play while Cheyne furiously tweaks his knobs.
(* As as since been pointed out in the commentary section, Palm Springs is actually east of Los Angeles not west.)