How many times have you been in a wave pool at a water park and been like, “meh… this kinda sucks.” Besides the feeling of swimming in liquid syphilis, the wave pool experience leaves a lot to be desired. Like… You can’t surf them. You can’t boogie-board them. You basically just bob up and down in them.
Leave it to Kelly Slater — the undisputed LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant of surfing and his Kelly Wave Company to perfect the the man-made wave.
Here’s how he humblebragged about it 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!
Typhoon Lagoon has nothing on this.
[H/T: Action Sports Daily]