Kelly Slater and the perfect artificial wave

kelly-slater-wave-company

It seems that Kelly once again managed to surprise the entire surf scene. After 11 world titles in his pocket, during the last couple of seasons he wasn’t among the best surfers who competed for the title, but it is obvious now that he had other jobs beside World Championship Tour. For example, one of them was to build so far the best artificial wave in the world…

After a brief look at the video in which he surfs in his classic style during the early winter morning on the lake at an unknown location, you will probably hardly believe how big is the size of this wave, as well as how well formed and perfect it is. If we saw just a couple of close-ups in which you don’t see the surroundings, we would be one hundred percent confident that this is some nice ocean wave.

Kelly Slater Wave Company is located in Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and the whole project has been in development since 2005. For a long time there was no news in the media with any tangible evidences that the team had made some improvements in development of this wave. You may have heard that several different companies fight in the race for the first artificial wave that will be open to the public, but all alternative attempts are obviously worse for now, from FlowRider to Wavegarden. Wavegarden’s first commercial swimming pool with artificial waves, Surf Snowdonia in Wales (UK) had a lot of problems after the opening, and on several occasions was later closed for the repairs. During the first season it worked shorter than planned and a new opening is scheduled for April 2016.

All in all, although it seemed that he might give up, Kelly wins again. Although he had some difficulties with financing, defects in the pool design and similar problems, it looks like the pool is really ready for use. With its superior wave and tubes that last up to around 30 seconds, with quality and form which can only be dreamed of in the wild ocean, it is something different than anything we’ve seen before. In addition, it must be admitted that Kelly definitely knows how to gain the world’s attention, since his post on Instagram was placed during the peak surf season, when the new world champion Adriano de Souza and the rest of the surfers from the top of the charts competed in Hawaii for the title in the finals of so far most uncertain WSL season. Now let’s just hope that first this ideal pool will soon be opened to regular mortals, and that later one of the pools is going to appear in the proximity of Europe 🙂

Kelly’s Wave from Kelly Slater Wave Company on Vimeo.

Original post on Instagram:

Now that the world title has been decided and events for the year have finished, I’m excited to show you what I’ve been sitting on for the past couple of weeks. For nearly ten years, my team and I have been working on creating the first truly world-class, high-performance, human-made waves. This is something I dreamt about as a kid. Through rigorous science and technology, we’ve been able to design and build what some said was impossible, and many very understandably never thought would actually happen. I’m proud to say we took our time to get it right, and the first fully-working prototype of the wave now exists (a huge personal thank you to everyone in our lab and on our team for seeing this through!). I’ll be sharing more details in the coming weeks and months but I can’t wait any longer to share a film of my experience surfing the wave for the first time, almost two weeks ago. It was an insane day. I’m still a little in disbelief, and trying to process how much fun this wave is, but it certainly feels like this is going to change a lot of perceptions about human-made waves. There’s a direct link in my bio to kswaveco.com to view the short film. Can’t wait to see other people surf it soon and show what is possible on this thing. #KSWaveCo #FreakOfTechnology #LooksLikeSuperbank but #NotCrowded!

A video posted by Kelly Slater (@kellyslater) on Dec 18, 2015 at 9:14am PST