"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