Looks like the pool is going to be built soon... From Swellnet.
SURFPOLITIK
Wavepools: Within the year and with Rabbit on board
Swellnet: Word is the first Webber Wavepool isn't too far off. What's happening?
Greg Webber: It's true. We've got a guy ready to build a prototype on his land. He's got a few different blocks of land so we're just looking at sites at the moment. It'll be somewhere in New South Wales.
Dan Mackenzie is his name. He's actually invested with the company and he has his own business called High Roller, which is to do with motorcross. He likes the idea of digging a hole in the ground for a wavepool and then using the dirt for a bike track – a motorcross track, you know what I mean. He reckons it's a perfect fit. Usually when people say that they mean it in some conceptual or marketing way. Not this time, he's loving the fact that he can take the dirt out of the ground and make something with it. He'll make an incredible motorcross track.
SN: What about size? How big will the prototype wavepool be?
GW: It'll be 150 m length. It's a part of a circle. We're no longer doing the full circle. What we're doing now is a crescent – a third of a circle. We did research and it made a lot of sense to drop the footprint to a third of what the full circle would be while still having all the advantages of making two waves per hull and a really high wave rate.
There are all manner of advantages building it like this, especially as a business. Say if we chop a circle in to thirds and run them separately to each other you've got the opportunity to run three different wave heights at all times which attracts the broadest demographic. You can have 1 metre waves, 1.5 metre waves, and 2 metre waves running all at the same time which you cant really do in a circular pool.
SN: What height will the prototype be operating at?
GW: 1.5 metres. That's what were aiming at. Possibly bigger but we're just gonna say 1.5 metres for now.
SN: And the main focus of this pool will be for testing, right?
GW: Sure. The focus is to hone what we know at full scale. We've done all the experimentation you'd ever want to do and I was on the verge of going back into the test lab to do a larger scale crescent. With the crescent we can put a much, much larger model into a test basin because it's not full diameter. That totally transformed the way we scaled it. But when I started thinking that way I went '**** this' let's just make it full size on some land. I realised we were gonna spend $100,000 to $150,000 doing another test and if we, say, triple that we can build a full scale one.
SN: That's the cost?
GW: Yep, roughly half a million dollars.
SN: So when will it go into the ground?
GW: Well he's already started digging on one property so I'd say it'd be finished between six and eight months.
SN: Does this mean you've won the race against the Kelly Slater Wave Company?
GW: In the sense that we get a pool in first – yes. But it doesn't mean he wont produce something at some stage in the future. From a practical point of view he's got his wave making method that's now obviously slightly different to ours. He's not trying to put forward a patent that's similar to ours. He's gone in a different direction. It uses a wave, it's like a soliton effectively, and it will work. Same as the Wave Garden, it makes a bulge that turns into a soliton-like wave and then that wave refracts and breaks on the edge of a circular pool, or a channel like Wave Garden have.
When it comes to winning the race though, the race will be more to do with who makes the best wave. That's not going to be known until we get out there with this model and, lets say, Wave Garden finish their bigger version, and pro surfers ride ours and pros surfers ride theirs and they pass judgment.
If the wavepools work fairly evenly then the standard of the wave will be the critical issue. If you make a wave that the pro surfers rave about then you're gonna have a significant edge over someone who creates a wave that doesn't have a bottom to it. And we've got a bottom on our wave that is inherent to the design. It sucks....I don't mean it sucks in a bad way.
SN: You flow water against the the wave as it's travelling...
GW: Yeah, and it creates a trough in front of the wave. And soliton waves cannot, ever, have a trough in front of the wave. For that reason you miss the bottom half of the wave. You've got a top, and if it's two metres high it will be a totally fun wave. It will be like one of those softer, slightly fatter fun waves with a bit of a tube in the top two thirds. But it won't throw and it wont have a bottom to bottom turn off.
So that's the big race. The big race will be proven when they're actually manufactured and companies have bought them and people are riding them and comparisons are made. That's the second part of the race.
SN: You recently got Rabbit Bartholomew on board.
GW: Yeah. We've got a handshake agreement whereby he has a shareholding in the company now. I'm stoked to have him on board. It's taken over a year to think about and discuss how he'll represent us and what role he'll have. Obviously his background with managing the ASP for so long and his understanding of events will be the key to the role that he'll play.
For one, he's giving us his acknowledgement that he thinks ours is the superior design, and two, he'll be instrumental in how we approach events that will transform competitive surfing globally. He's the right man for the job. He's already got vision – you know what I mean? We've fallen in to his lap as much as he's fallen into ours.
He really can see the potential to transform things, possibly even to the degree that a different type of tour would be possible. Obviously the broadcast potential has huge merit so there's all sorts of consequences when you bring out new systems. Possibly even new judging systems. So we're gonna do the background using his mind checking against the ideas that I've got so that we can make sure we're presented in the most faultless and neatest fashion. He's a huge bonus to my company.
SN: You had him out on the Clarence River wake testing recently. How did that go?
GW: It was complete and utter animation. He was doing 15 snaps in a row on a 1 metre wave. That basically sold it, he loved the idea. We'd talked before but I just said 'get down here and I'll give you some waves'. I watched him do so many snaps in a row, and how old is he? Can't be far off 60. And the hands started moving, he started jiving, I was waiting for an Occy look back.
You know when someone, no matter what their age, gets slightly excited and they begin to realise that they're really in synch. You know what it's like, you've done 3 or 4 consecutive snaps and you go 'I'm really ****ing ripping here!' I saw that happen to Rabbit.
He was already excited so once he rode the first wave he was like, 'Alright, this is it. This is gonna blow the world away'.
SP
> 9 months ago, 12 Jul 2012
plenty of room for our beer & bundy fridges too
