For the last two years, we lived in hot anticipation of the world’s greatest wavepool. It was to be housed in Florida, and it was to include a changeable bottom that could, at the twist of a dial, switch from a fun beachbreak into a dramatic ledge. Now? It ain’t gonna happen, buddy… Photo and story by Jimmy Wilson
Mark my words. There will
not be a legitimate
wavepool made for a long
fucking time. You can cry
yourself to sleep at night
or whatever the fuck eases
your pain, but if you think
you’re gonna be getting
any chlorine pits anytime soon with the luxury of a few
man-made pumps of water… I’ll just go ahead and
shatter your dreams right now like that bitch mom did
to the precious leg lamp in A Christmas Story (youtube: A
Christmas Story Broken Lamp).
That’s right, folks. Our once realistic hope that we
wouldn’t have to pay attention to any more bullshit
Surfline.com forecasts, or worry about how to fit a surf
session into our busy schedules of trying to make more
cash flow and get more pussy. That hope that we could
just roll our fat ass on down to the Surf Park and get our
rip on, just took a turn south. By south, I mean in the
direction of hell, not the glistening-with-pussy-sweat
nightclubs of South Beach, Miami.
Who do we have to thank for flattening our dream
like a steamroller on asphalt? None other than Ron Jon
Surf Shop. The most bullshit of all bullshit surf shops in
the universe. Ron Jon from its early origination has only
been a cold sore on the dickhead of surf society. It
breeds the image that surfers are a group of dumbass
Cocoa Beach, Florida (Hometown of Jimmy Slade), bros
who spend their days on the beach shredding the
knee-high sandbar peelers, applying tanning oil, and
working on their six-packs (abs not beers) while hoping
for some beach-blanket whore to approach them and
suck their cock. If you have ever seen one of their many
shitty billboards driving along Interstate 95 in the
Sunshine State of Florida, you would have no choice to
agree with what I’m saying here. I mean, at least put a
smokin’ hot girl in a bikini back up on your billboards
like the days of old. I sure as fuck don’t want to see
some death sentence photo of a look-a-like dude from
90210 in elastic-waist floral boardies throwing a shaka at
me when I’m trying to concentrate on staying awake
driving down the most boring road you’ve ever seen.
I’ll admit I’m a little off subject here, but those Ron
Jon assholes just pissed me off one too many times.
They are the brains and bank account behind what we
all once hoped to be the solution to our less than
average surf conditions on the south-east coast of the
United States, otherwise know as Ron Jon Surf Parks. It
looked like the real deal from the start. A solid financial
foundation, a hip new website with digital previews that
made it look like Pipeline was about to come to Orlando.
The hype was real, unfortunately nothing else was.
When I got the call that I would be the lucky
sonofabitch invited to come shoot photos of the first
surf in this new “revolutionary wave pool” with CJ
Hobgood and the brothers Lopez, I almost shat myself!
I thought I was about to shoot an important moment in
surfing history. Then there were some problems and the
session got delayed until further notice. Instead, it
ended up being Aaron Cormican, Alec Parker and Evan
Geiselman as the first surfers to try the pool out. The
moment we pulled up to the contraption
disappointment set in. I just knew it wasn’t going to
work, but I decided to retain a little hope until I
watched the first waves pump out. Here’s the
play-by-play of what I witnessed… Fifty-kilo super-grom
Evan Geiselman struggles to work the knee-high
dribbler into the inside section and almost manages to
get radical with a pathetic whitewater climb at the end,
before dry docking himself on a shitty metal grill.
“How could this happen?” I thought to myself. I
know this was only the prototype kiddie pool, but the
whole layout was just wack. I came to find out, the
dudes who created this thing had no idea how to ride a
goddamn surfboard. Creator A was a mad Kiwi scientist
who all I heard say was a bitter “It’s not possible” when
Creator B would scream at him to crank
up the power in
the control room. Neither one knew how to surf. I
observed Creator B from the edge as he struggled to get
his feet under his body and onto the deck of his 7’6”
funshape. I have to give him a little credit still because I
know the wave conditions were hell, but that was his
own fault wasn’t it?
Dimension-wise, the pool was only about 15 metres
wide, if that, and only maybe 30 metres long. It got
narrower from the back to the front. Anyone who surfs
understands that you don’t ride waves going straight in.
They have standing waves for that. You ride waves going
down the line horizontally. That’s how you get speed.
Ever check out how far the distance you travel is on a
wave? Even on your worst rides during shitty days at
beachbreaks it’s a whole lot more than 15 metres across.
So the design of this hell-hole was doomed from the
start. What about the “six waves per minute!” claim
they threw out to the public? Well, that’s great in theory,
but the problem with it is, as soon as one little ripple
pops out of the machine, it chops the hell out of the
surface from bouncing off the walls. So, 10 seconds later,
when the next waves dumps out, it’s like surfing in a
washing machine. And each wave after that just
becomes progressively worse.
How about that ever-changing bottom called
“Versa-Reef” they claimed could morph the pool from a
fun, ramping beachbreak and turn it into a heaving
Teahupoo-esque pit? Ha ha! Hilarious! They tried
changing the bottom when I was there and I
honest-to-god could not tell the difference from what it
was before. All I saw was, when they pumped up the
pool to full power it would turn into a waist-high,
suck-up closeout that even Cormican couldn’t make the
drop on.
So, there you have it. Not only do we have Ron Jon
Surf Parks to thank for getting our hopes up, we can also
thank them for stunting any future development on
wavepools around the world for the next decade. I
guarantee you, investors have taken note of this hideous
failure. They took top-notch technology and millions of
dollars to create a contraption that is easily shown up by
neighbour Typhoon Lagoon’s wave pool, which wasn’t
even built specifically for surfing, and was constructed
in 1989!
How have we managed to go backwards in wave pool
technology in the year 2008? That Malaysia pool may be
sick to do some whip-ats, but if you don’t have a PWC,
good luck with surfing that shit. I saw one they made in
Las Vegas but that was even worse than Malaysia’s. As
soon as they pumped out a it just flooded the shit out of
the fake beach on the shore. Typhoon Lagoon in
Orlando is a rideable wave but not so much suited for
high-performance surfing. It can be fun but is a novelty
at best. The best wave pool ever created was in Japan,
which looked fun and even gave the opportunity for a
few silly head-dips, but it has been closed.
Now, they have finally officially shut the Ron Jon Surf
Parks project down until further notice, and all I can
really do is laugh.
Making a legitimate wave pool is completely possible.
It just needs to be approached the right way. By that I
mean a few simple things…
There needs to be a gigantic area filled with
millions of gallons of water for it to truly work. Think:
the size of a football stadium; Not: the size of that
pathetic little shack you call your house. And, it needs
an adjustable bottom that can be very deep or very
shallow in any spot of the pool controlled by computers.
There needs to be some way for the water
to flow through the sides so that it doesn’t chop the fuck
out of the whole place with backwash once the first set
rolls through.
There needs to be tanks with enough power
to force a decent size swell into the pool so it has the
push to give the average surfer some real speed.
And there needs to be a person with enough
money to make this all happen. Bill Gates and Donald
Trump come to mind. None of those bastards are going
to waste their money on something like this, which
basically puts us in the column of “shit out of luck”.
Enjoy the ocean people. Help is not on the way.
Posts: 47
Reply #47 on : Fri April 30, 2010, 08:15:55