Surf legend Kelly Slater blew everyone away with the world’s first barreling artificial wave back in 2015 and then doubled down on the buzz last month by announcing he would open his own public wave pool in Florida. Now it’s the city of Perth’s turn as it recently announced an innovative new wave park coming to Alfred Cove in Perth, Australia for between 2018 and 2019. Though the announcement came with a short video, the company behind the pool — WaveGarden — just released a sneak preview of the much anticipated, highly covert wave pool dubbed, The Cove.
Designers behind the WaveGarden 2.0 prototype kept the details tightly sealed during their ongoing testing in Spain’s Basque Country, releasing little info about the architecture or features of the pool. However, the company now released a photo which effectively set the surf scene on fire with chatter. Although it’s hard to glean much from the photo, WaveGarden’s Austin, Texas pool produces perfectly curling left and right waves capable of making surfers of any skill level salivate.
The entire Perth surf lagoon does look a little different from the WaveGarden’s Austin design, however, which featured peeling waves towards a central pier — to WaveGarden’s dismay, this design received generally mixed reviews. For Perth’s installation, the company intends to lean on a new baseball diamond-shaped pool which supposedly cranks out 1,000 waves per hour. If this statistic holds true, it would mean the facility would produce one wave every four seconds. Concerning its height, the preview photo appears to show a roughly four or five-foot curling wave.
Scheduled to open sometime between 2018 and 2019, WaveGarden hasn’t released much additional information outside of its initial teaser video and now this published photo. According to URBNsurf, however, it’s likely WaveGarden’s 2.0 pops up in other Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne in the coming years, as well.
