The Best Wavepool You’ll Never Surf
Jacob Szekely speaks on São Paulo’s internet-breaking, members only, chlorinated catapult.
It takes a lot for a wavepool to arrest my scroll nowadays.
As I clamber down the serotonin ladder of diminishing doomscroll returns, crude political memes, and life-hacks from wellness influencers of dubious reliability, rarely do I choose to spend more than a nanosecond observing some surfer hit the same section in the same pool filmed from the same angle I’ve seen a thousand times.
But in the past two weeks, the São Paulo Surf Club got me.
Thrice.
First, with Pedro Barros’ nonsensical backside nosebone.
Second, with Kevin Schulz ozone-penetrating backflip (riding the new Groove.)
And third, with whatever Jacob Szekely did here.
Brazil has, rather quietly, become a superpower in the wave pool arms race. There’s Boa Vista Village. There’s Surfland in Florianópolis. There’s Praia da Grama, with its artificially chlorinated take on the Mentawai Islands.
And now there’s São Paulo Surf Club, a private sanctuary for the city’s elite, where the usual trappings of wealth—beach tennis courts, pickleball, a spa, a restaurant curated to match the aesthetic ambitions of its patrons—are now accessorized with a surf break.
Spanning 220 meters in length, the São Paulo Surf Club’s surf pool features PerfectSwell technology from American Wave Machines, which JHSF Real Estate has exclusive rights to in Brazil.
You can read our initial reports on the pool here and here.
The ramp in question is dubbed the ‘McFly,’ a newly designed wave combining a barrel section followed by an aerial section.
By all accounts, it’s revolutionary.
“The pool is way bigger than Waco, probably twice the length of Waco, maybe even two and a half times the length,” says Jacob Szekely. “But, the length has nothing to do with the air section. They said that they could make a similar air section like this at the Japan pool, which is even smaller than Waco. It’s all technology based. It’s honestly a really quick and short wave, but it’s the perfect combination of an easy takeoff with a slingshot amount of speed into this crazy wedged apex whitewash thing that pops up.
“I’ve been in talks with these guys for months about getting to the Boa Vista pool, which is the one a couple hours away with the same technology — owned by the same guys,” he explains. ”But I ended up getting the opportunity to come to this one. When we got there, they wanted to warm us up on some of the other waves. So we did a couple turn waves, we did a couple of the double-shot air section waves, and then they showed us the McFly section and it looked massive. When we first started hitting it, we were like, ‘Holy shit, this thing is gnarly.’
“If you hit it too early, you go straight to the flats. If you hit it at the apex, you go so high that the whitewash catches up to you and there’s a perfect landing, but you’re so high that your body just can’t physically land a lot of the time,” Zeke laughs. “There was probably an hour, maybe even two hours, where we were all going so high and just getting buckled.
“At a certain point I had to just tone it back a tiny bit, and then we started landing some airs. They made a couple little changes to the landing, but for the most part American Wave Machines had already dialed the most amazing air section of all time before we even arrived.”
From what we’ve heard, the only way to access the pool will be through a $150,000 membership fee — which doesn’t include continued annual or monthly payments throughout the year.
To note, though this pool is owned by the same people who own Boa Vista, this São Paulo Surf Club operates under a different strategy. At Boa Vista, you have to own one of the apartments in the complex to have access — while SPSC is strictly membership based.
“Yeah, it’s expensive and it’s privatized,” chuckles Zeke. “To be honest, when we were talking to the owners, I was offering to bring down some big pros and big name celebrities to help publicize the place, and they were pretty much not interested. From now on they’re selling memberships only and these rich guys don’t care about clips or airs or content. I was basically like, ‘When do you think we’ll be able to come back?’ And they’re like, ‘Maybe never,’” he laughs.
“So, with the exception of Italo and Gabriel Medina who will probably be connected with members, the chances of other pros going down there and surfing that pool and doing crazy airs on that section soon are slim to none.
“It’s the best air section in any wavepool in the world and nobody will get to surf it.”
As you’ll see at 13:58, Zeke narrowly misses out on landing what looks like a sort of 540 Alley-Oop bigspin — an NBD that Josh Kerr started trying years ago.
“That trick is actually one that Kerrzy has been trying for almost 20 years now,” says Zeke. “He showed me that trick a couple years ago when we were in Waco together. It’s like a lien alley oop double spin with a shuv in the middle of it. I don’t even really know what it’s called. Josh got super close to doing it a couple times, but at a certain point he was done, he was like ‘I’m handing it off to you. The baton has been passed.’ He wants somebody to land it. So it’s Kerr’s trick. I’m just hoping I can put it down one of these days.”
During the session, Zeke says a handful of curious eyes began prying from the surrounding skyscrapers.
“It was crazy seeing how many surfers there are in a big city like that. I was blown away. After the first couple hours of surfing in the pool, there were dozens of drones flying in from different skyscrapers and apartment buildings, and they were poaching our clips. I saw on my Instagram random people had figured out it was me, posted me on their Instagram, and tagged me. That was pretty cool to see the excitement around the pool.”
And, reportedly, a few unseen clips from the session will be making their way into the upcoming Snapt 5 film.
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