What Actually Happened to Occy’s Mad Max Plunger Pool In Yeppoon?

Made in partnership with Surf Lakes.

“Why aren’t you fucking open? Let us in. You’re just keeping it for Occy and his rich, famous mates.”

We’ve arrived at a peculiar juncture in human history. A time when we can bludgeon nature into submission using pistons, steel arms, and enough fossilised plant matter to trigger a psychotic episode in Greta Thunberg. Never before have we so brazenly strong-armed the elements, turned the untameable into a theme park attraction, under the dual banners of venture capital and recreational thirst.

Equally, never before has it been easier to lob a digital rock from the sidelines, land it squarely in the temple and, when the crowd turns to see who threw it, shrug from behind a locked account and a username like @tradhousewife2004.

Back in 2018, when footage from Surf Lakes’ Yeppoon site first leaked, it looked like something between a mining accident and a utopian fever dream. A 360-degree plunger belching out concentric waves like some psycho-industrial mushroom, surrounded by Queensland cow paddocks and fronted by a trio of golden-era world champs: Occy, Parko, and Barton Lynch. 

The footage, at first, dropped jaws. Then it quickly started dropping trust. As the years limped on, with no public sessions, no ticket sales, no signs of life beyond the occasional Occy cameo, something curdled. The public, having felt they were served a full-motion promise in 2018, started to feel strung along. High-profile surfers kept appearing in edits. The plunger kept plunging. Meanwhile, the gates stayed locked.

So what went wrong?

Well, according to Surf Lakes’ head of marketing, Brad Hutchins, everything’s on track — if you don’t look too closely at the timeline.

“It got everyone’s attention, but as soon as people saw it, they assumed it was open and ready to go,” he says.

Yeppoon, he explains, was never meant to last. It was a prototype. A sacrificial lamb built from cheap materials. A working hallucination to stir interest and, more critically, investment. Built without billionaires or venture funds, Surf Lakes had no backroom to build in. So they built in public. The whole mad thing was designed to impress, and then collapse into the paddock.

“It’s been in the public eye the whole time,” says Brad. “We had to show the prototype so we could attract more attention and more investment. The other pools had the luxury of tinkering in private. They got to polish it in secret. We had to prove it worked in front of everybody.”

And now, with a public campaign underway and no deep-pocketed backers behind the curtain, they say this is it: the beginning of the real plan.

In an age where surfing’s been quietly gated off — the WSL and Natural Selection floated by billionaires, surf country clubs charging annual dues for glossy exclusivity, Nathan Fletcher muttering, “Surfing’s for the rich” — Surf Lakes appears to be making a different kind of pitch:

The Relatable Wave Park™, built by the people, for the people. Held together by Australian small business energy. But also: maybe the most impressive of the lot. 

When it first sputtered to life in 2018, a young Mikey C, mid-era cynicism and very much uninvited, muttered a rare endorsement: “It could be the best wavepool yet – both in terms of quality and profitability, which are the only two factors that really matter. But they need to get it working first.”

It might all sound like PR boilerplate, but if you’re partial to a silver tongue, allergic to capital, and tickled by backyard underdogs betting the rent on a dream sans parachute, then there might be something here for you.

Below, Brad Hutchins talks Tom Curren coming in as an ambassador, Troy Warfield (of Topgolf pedigree) taking the reins as CEO, navigating online critics, pulling the plug on Yeppoon, heading for the US without selling the Australian accent, and trying to stay scrappy in a market built for giants.

Stab: Give us the short version — how did Surf Lakes come to be and where is it heading?

Brad Hutchins: Okay, 13 years since conception.  Seven-plus years of prototyping. Five years at 1:1 scale in Yeppoon. Fifteen-million-plus invested into the technology — and a lot of noise online. 

Nine licenses sold for sites around the USA and Australia. We’ve got projects in various stages of development either chasing land, money or approvals. We plan to rebuild Yeppoon into a tropical surf resort, and start construction in the USA where surf park development is finally starting to gain momentum.  

Aaron, our Founder, knows the long version. He started prototyping at home, just mucking around on a small scale. That viral clip from 2018 was actually the fourth version of the machine. Initially, he was in his backyard pool, trying to figure out the best mechanism to push out a wave. Literally in a backyard swimming pool.

From there, he moved into reef prototyping. Just figuring out how to shape the bottom to get the most out of those swells. He did 1:25th, then 1:10th, and 1:5th scale models. Kit Sidwell, our co-inventor and lead mechanical / R&D engineer helped with prototyping and lent his mad-scientist brain to the cause. DHI assisted with bathymetry (reef design). Early days, none of it was surfable, just tiny waves, testing the idea. But they were perfect little waves.

That’s when Occy got involved. He came out to a farm where the 1:5th testing was happening, had a look and was like, “Yep, this is legit.” From that point, he’s been part of it. That’s when things started feeling real. A few investors came on board, and suddenly it wasn’t just a backyard dream anymore. 

Talk me through what happened after the Yeppoon footage started coming out.

People were frothing. We needed the exposure to get people to jump on board and fund it. And because the machine is so big and so visual, it worked — with one big issue. As soon as people saw the waves, they thought it was open… Ever since, we’ve been stuck with that assumption.

Which means we’ve copped the full commentary. People saying, “It breaks down,” “It’s unreliable,” all that chat. And being transparent, things have broken. That’s the nature of R&D. But every break was a win for the engineers. Every weak point got upgraded. That’s the point of prototyping.

People are like, “Why aren’t you fucking open? Let us in. You’re just keeping it for Occy and his rich, famous mates.”

That’s definitely not the case. We want this tech out in the world. But you can’t just open a prototype to the public. There’s legal stuff, safety, insurance.

It’s been seven years since then. Why haven’t any big investors come in to bankroll the whole thing? 

To start with, we received so many enquiries we were just focused on selling licenses. That was to get some cash flow into the business, get ourselves positioned for that big player, and get a few projects moving so we could scale up. 

It’s only been in the past 18 months that we’ve opened to public investment. That shift came because, while we have a good number of licensees, they face the same long and slow progress as us in securing land, approvals and funding. 

That’s what pushed us to start looking for investment — so we could take more ownership and steer projects ourselves.

Now, with Troy Warfield joining as CEO, we’re positioned well. Troy was responsible for Topgolf’s global expansion, and he’s done that successfully for several businesses over his career. 

The online commentary basically said the tech was a bust. What actually went wrong?

It didn’t actually break, not in the way people think. We decommissioned it for safety in the end, but yeah — there were some hits along the way.

Back in 2018, the Conrod snapped. It was too long. That happened during a session with Stab and a few surfers — Ozzie Wright was there, I think. So we shortened the Conrod, beefed it up, and after that it ran fine for a couple more years.

The real challenges weren’t mechanical — they were environmental. Because it was a prototype, there was no water filtration. We always had concerns about water quality, especially after what happened in Texas with the brain-eating amoeba. You don’t want that kind of press.

On top of that, the lake bed started deteriorating. In the commercial model, it’ll be solid — treated concrete, super durable. But in Yeppoon, we were working with spraycrete, just a thin layer. And those waves ended up being way more powerful than expected. Eventually, the bottom started shredding. Concrete chunks coming loose. Not ideal.

So yeah, we had to make the call. We didn’t want to keep running it and risk someone getting hurt.

In hindsight, we definitely should’ve communicated that better. We just assumed people understood it was a prototype. But clearly they didn’t. Even now, I get emails all the time — “Hey, I’m driving past Yeppoon, can I book a session?” I’m like, mate, we haven’t run that thing in two years, and it was never open to the public in the first place.

How did it feel to shut down the site?

It was bitter-sweet. We all miss the waves and atmosphere of demo days, but it was a necessary milestone to complete R&D and move on to the commercial phase. 

The prototype lasted a lot longer than we expected. It was never built to last 25 years like the commercial model. But the engineers walked away with a ton of data — every rep, every improvement point — and they’ve taken all that and re-engineered the tech to be market-ready.

Back in March 2022, we ran the biggest artificial waves ever created. Since then, no one’s come close. Seems like most other techs hit their ceiling on wave size.

That’s one of our advantages — our commercial machine can push waves another 20% bigger. 

Now the machine is complete, we’re still grinding R&D on all sorts of other projects: different climates, smaller footprints, bigger waves, adaptable reefs. 

We’re striving to future-proof the tech. Because, realistically, the wave pool race is still in its infancy. There are only a few players so far, and we want to be a key player for decades to come. 

Tell me something I don’t know about starting a wave pool company. What have some of the challenges been that you didn’t anticipate? 

My favourite quote from Aaron is, “It took twice as long and cost twice as much to solve and was 100 times harder than I could imagine.” I heard a similar quote from the CEO of Nvidia recently. Every start-up seems to go through it. 

The team always figured the hardest part would be the engineering — inventing a machine that had never existed before. 

But the real monster hasn’t been the mechanics. It’s the business side and the funding. Getting people to take a risk on a completely unique invention within an emerging sector. Not the physics, not the patents. It’s convincing someone with money to bet on your backyard dream. 

So now you’re opening it up for public investment?

Yeah, we get people coming up to us all the time saying, “Yours is the one. This thing just makes sense. That’s the best one.” And we’re like — yeah, we agree. So get behind it. Help us fund it.

So, if anyone does want to get behind it, there’s an opportunity for the public to invest. It’s the first time we’ve done a retail round that anyone can invest in. You can get in for a thousand U.S. bucks.

It’s important to note that it’s a U.S. raise, so it rules out Australians for now. But we’ll do an Aussie round for Yeppoon soon. 

Do you feel like you’ve done enough to get people on board?

We can always do more. Providing more updates and transparency is part of that. We’ll be coming out with more info and renders around the engineering from now on. But the waves cook, and people seem genuinely excited to surf them. 

Honestly, though, we want to reframe expectations a bit. I feel like we’ve become the Grand Theft Auto 6 of surfing. Everyone’s just like — when the fuck is it coming out? And we get it. We want it open more than anyone. We’ve surfed it. We miss it. We know how bloody good it is, and we’re not ‘keeping it to ourselves’. We can’t wait to share it with everyone.

Why did you move operations to the U.S.?

We looked at where the demand was — and out of the nine licenses we’d sold, eight were in the U.S. So it was pretty clear: that’s where the market is. 

In early 2024, we officially became a Delaware corporation, based in the U.S. We’ve still got our Aussie office on the Gold Coast, and most of our staff are still here, but we’ve got a U.S. team now too. Commercially, it just made sense. It puts us closer to our licensees and closer to the action.

We’ll always be an Australian-made company and honour those roots. Being the only Aussie wave tech has had its pros and cons. But being able to list on the NASDAQ when it’s time to IPO offers shareholders so much more growth potential. 

What’s the progress report on those licenses you’ve sold? How close are we to seeing a Surf Lakes park up and running? 

All those projects are in various stages of securing land, approvals, and funding. Some have the first two ticked off. Approvals can take years when dealing with government. We support our licensees daily but most surf park projects have taken five to seven years to complete.

Is the plan to eventually come back to Australia?

Absolutely — we never left!  That’s something I really want to make clear. 

In fact, we see Yeppoon as the fastest path to opening. We actually own that land freehold. Council was really supportive on the approvals. So if we had the funding today, we could start building tomorrow. That’s the only missing piece — capital. Everything else is ready to go.

Air sections?

Yeah! We’re working on removable and adjustable reef segments you can swap in and out. Keeps the waves flexible and changes things up. 

We can have four reefs firing at the same time, each for a different skill level. So, you’ve got someone getting barrelled on a heavy slab on one side, and a beginner catching their first wave in the whitewash on the other.  

Tom Curren seems like a natural skeptic, so it must be good for business and for your image, having him join as an investor.

It’s epic to have Tom on the team. He doesn’t seem to put his name on things unless he truly believes in them. So, it’s validating, especially since Aaron has that relationship with him now. Having Occ involved so they can work together under the same brand for the first time, feels pretty special.

Tom’s got that naturally creative streak so you’re likely going to see content in future of him tinkering with Aaron on some new reef designs or R&D projects. 

When are we actually going to see one of these things up and running? 

It’s all about the money now.

Pending funds, we get into construction this year. That takes 15-18 months, and we can aim for an early 2027 opening. GTA VI may just beat us after all! Things speed up from there though. Now that resort developers are seeing surf parks as the next golf resort, there are several parties watching and preparing to fund projects. 

That’s where our size will become a benefit. With the surf park market maturing, being able to service 200 surfers an hour with all surfing abilities at once, and the biggest waves … that creates a unique environment. The lake is huge — 800 meters (half a mile) of shoreline. There’s a lot going on around a Surf Lake when it’s pumping. Whether you’re looking at it as a developer or a punter, Surf Lakes will create a new category of surf park that caters to public, private, mixed use, beginners, pros, everyone. 

The first one will domino everything else. Once it’s running and demonstrates the profit a Surf Lake can generate, that backyard swimming pool will be a distant (but very fond) memory. 

To learn more about Surf Lakes, or to invest in a piece of the pond, click here.