This is the world’s least necessary wavepool (and it’s in Hawaii)

Hawaii! Our mecca, our promised land! The birthplace of surfing and home of our sport’s most photographed stretch of reefs! On the list of things that Hawaii needs, Stab wouldn’t have thought a wavepool would rate real high. And yet, because we’re late in the 20-teens and everybody has to build one, there is now a proposed wavepark that could be operational by 2017.  It’ll be at a place called the Endless Summer Resort, on Oahu’s westside. Yeah, the North Shore is where most the waves are, but… there’s just something odd about creating fake waves in a place so famous for its surf.

The Green Waters Group of Bridge Real Estate announced the plan recently, detailing a 400 unit resort based around a four-acre PerfectSwell surf pool, using technology developed by American Wave Machines. As is always the projections of these kinda things, the pool is said to have the capacity for small, beginner style waves all the way up to those that will “exceed the real thing for expert surfers,” as Surf City Hui, LLC co-founder Chad Waters says.

The overriding design philosophy was to create the dynamics of the ocean at the beach, and not just individual waves. Because there’s not enough real beaches in Hawaii…

How many wave parks are we waiting on to be built now? At least one, two and three, plus this. The world sure is trigger-happy for commissioning synthetic waves right now; the real question is who’ll be first to create one that’s as good as the Wavegarden but of a significant size…