By the time you read this we may well be seeing the beginnings of the end of the festive surf drought in Noosa, and I’ll drink to that!
Just in time to wave goodbye to the trickle of departing visitors, their cabanas and sifts piled high on the roof of the family van, I see signs of a long-form easterly pulse mid-January (not much but enough) coupled with variable winds, including some good days of SE trades. It could evaporate but Huey couldn’t be so cruel, could she?
Meantime, out of the water with yet another skin cancer excision wound for half of it, struggling with the aged popup in the dribble on offer for the other half, I actually started thinking, wouldn’t it be great to live next door to a wave pool! Which brings me to the point of this preamble.
Just before Christmas, on 18 December (or 19 here if you want to be pedantic), the surfing Club of Rome which hovers around the great Kelly Slater celebrated the 10th anniversary of the unveiling of what would become known as the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch, but in 2015 was just a repurposed water ski run outside the town of Lemoore, two hours east of the California coast. What happened on that cold December morning actually happened a fortnight before on 5 December and was held back a) for the footage to be enhanced, or b) to give the world of surfing a game-changing Christmas present, depending on your level of cynicism.
Personally, I agree that Kelly’s development of a near-perfect artificial wave has changed surfing forever. I’m just not sure if it’s in a good way or a bad way. Maybe if they let me ride the bloody thing I’d know! But I think that bird has flown.
I have a vivid recollection of watching those first videos of “Kelly’s Pool” on social media a decade ago, and being entranced by the steely grey perfection of the unridden wave, and then even more so by the shots of Kelly’s unfettered joy as he watched the miracle unfold, jumping up and down in the stands that eight degree Celsius morning, and later, the footage of him deeply barreled through the middle section on the third or fourth wave ridden. (He fell on the first and no one has ever seen the footage.)
Wave pools had been around for almost a decade before the GOAT was even born – Big Surf in Arizona showing the way (sort of) in the early ‘60s – but by the ‘80s, when Kelly first surfed one, doing an exhibition with older brother Sean in Texas, they seemed to have stalled in the space of gimmick only. Still, Kelly won a contest in a pool when he was 16, and started dreaming about creating his own wave.
In 2006, the now multiple world champ with more titles to come, met a British aerospace engineer called Adam Fincham, who specialised in fluid dynamics. Kelly hired him as head scientist of the newly-formed Kelly Slater Wave Company. By this time I knew Kelly quite well, having worked with him on numerous marketing assignments for Quiksilver in Europe, and around the time he hired Fincham, we had both contracted to produce a book to be called Kelly Slater: For The Love.
I spent most of 2007 tracking Kelly around the world while we put down nearly 50 hours of audiotape in Australia, California, Hawaii, France and Fiji. Not once, as we discussed everything under the sun in sessions that stretched long into the night, sometimes over a couple of bottles of good red, did the subject of a wave pool come up, nor was there a mention of the KWSC, already testing at scale in a secret warehouse tank in Los Angeles.
Over the eight years of development, Kelly played his cards close to his chest, with only the inner sanctum of scientists and gazillionaires in the loop, for which I admire his acumen under the pressure of growing stoke! Then the big reveal, when the “vehicle” pumped out 45-second barreling rights every five minutes. (The left came more than a year later.)
In September 2019 I was at the Save The Waves Coalition offices in Santa Cruz, California, signing off on final details for the March 2020 dedication of Noosa as the 10th World Surfing Reserve, when I got a call from Ross Phillips, founder of Tropicsurf. “I’m at the pool. If you can get here I might be able to get you a wave or two.”
Life of Brine and Wife of Brine jumped in the car and headed south east on the fastest inland route. You have to understand that a day at the Surf Ranch now costs between $US35,000 and $US85,000, depending on season. Back then, in September, it was $US50K and I didn’t have that in lazy notes.
We found the nondescript property outside the nondescript town and I was grabbed by a couple of old surf mates from New Jersey who told me to suit up and grab a Firewire out of the rack. We were on! I was poolside ready to jump on Raimana’s ski, when the man paying the bill, a multi from NYC and Ross’s coaching client, appeared with a clipboard and explained my name wasn’t on it. I whined, I cried, no avail. End of story.
We thought about exploring Lemoore and headed south instead. Even today, Trip Advisor’s list of 14 things to do in Lemoore has Surf Ranch last, and the Prancing Pony Farm first. There is an Indian casino, but if you’re going for the perfect wave, I say sell a house and do it!
Happy birthday, SR!
