Adam Fincham is trying to make waves with a food container full of agave and an avocado.
Internal waves, specifically—the kind that exist in stratified fluid. Fincham is standing at a metal chef’s table in the kitchen at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, in toasty Lemoore, California. A chef is in the kitchen preparing salmon grain bowls for the assemblage of pro surfers hanging around outside, but Fincham is intent on his own concoction. He’s pouring water against the curved side of a spoon, directly into the corner of the 7- by 7-inch Cambro container filled with the syrupy agave. Now, on top of that, he’s creating a lighter layer of water. Just like the ocean.1
He takes what he calls his wave generator—the avocado—and drops it gently into the container. Look from the side, he urges me. I crouch down and stare into the agave. Sure enough, in the layer of thick brown syrup, a tiny wave peels off the side of the container and rolls toward the other end of the container.
“See the wave coming across?” Fincham says to me. “Those are all over the ocean. Back and forth, back and forth.”
Fincham appears to delight in this, but his role at the Surf Ranch—where the inaugural Surf Ranch Pro competition begins tomorrow—is much bigger than kitchen science experiments. Several years ago, Fincham was tasked with creating the perfect wave. Not good, not great, perfect. It’s a word you hear a lot when people talk about the Surf Ranch. And on this particular day in late August, just two weeks before a bunch of professional surfers and 5,000 spectators will descend on the ranch for a nationally televised competition, something isn’t quite right with the perfect wave.
Fincham wasn’t always so obsessed with waves. At one point in his career, the aerospace engineer and self-described turbulence snob thought they were “the most bullshit thing ever. ‘Who does waves? You must be an idiot if you do waves, because you’re not smart enough to do anything else.’ There was my line of thinking. I’m very serious.”
Fincham, 52, was born in England and raised in Jamaica. He was a tinkerer from an early age. Growing up in the Caribbean, he says, meant he often made his own gadgets, from GI Joe accessories to automotive parts, rather than purchasing them. His father, a biochemistry teacher, eventually ended up relocating from Jamaica to Southern California to teach at USC. Fincham followed him there, dropping his physics studies at the University of the West Indies and picking up aerospace engineering at USC in 1985. The department was heavy with fluid dynamics experts; thus began Fincham’s relationship with fluids or, rather, the movement of fluids.
But even then, he was still more interested in geophysical turbulence than he was in waves. In the field of turbulence, much remains unsolved; Fincham saw this as a type of job security. After earning his PhD in geophysical fluid dynamics in 1994, he took off for France, where he worked at the National Center for Scientific Research.
It was through a program called Hydralab, a network of European research institutions with experimental hydraulic systems, that Fincham says he began to shed his snobbery against waves. He started conducting experiments on the Coriolis, the largest rotating water tank in the world. In Hannover, Germany, he worked on a 1,000-foot-long wave tank, one that generated waves 8 feet high. He conducted research on a wave tank in Barcelona and on a wave flume in Delft, Holland.
“As I started to learn more about nonlinear waves and internal solitary waves, I started getting more interested in surface waves,” Fincham tells me. We’re sitting at a picnic table on the patio at the Surf Ranch. Half a dozen pro surfers are there for practice runs, including Lakey Peterson, Carissa Moore, Coco Ho, Kolohe Andino, Griffin Colapinto, and Caroline Marks, who at 16 is the youngest female surfer ever to qualify for the championship tour.
Every 20 minutes or so, Fincham stands up and stares at the lagoon, when a wave is peeling toward us. It’s moving from the north side of the lagoon to the south end. To the untrained eye, the wave looks, well, perfect: a fast-moving, minute-long wave about 6 feet high, with plenty of swell for well-executed cutbacks and a generous barrel, the cylindrical part of the wave that some surfers spend their whole lives trying to get lost in. Fincham is displeased with something, though. He makes a phone call. Then he resumes his story.
After nine years in France, Fincham ended up back “home”: He got a job in the aerospace engineering department at USC, where he began working with oceanographers to study how turbulence impacts the ocean’s ecology. He didn’t know who Kelly Slater was when, in 2006, folks in his department said the world champion surfer had been inquiring “about making some kind of surfing wave.”
Fincham certainly knows Slater well now: He eventually became a cofounder of Kelly Slater Wave Co. According to Fincham, though, this man-made wave almost didn’t happen at all. When Slater first proposed the idea to the engineers at USC, he had envisioned a circular wave pool. “He wanted the perfect wave, but he also wanted an infinite wave. The idea was that the wave would go around in a never-ending ring,” Fincham says. “That was his initial vision.” (WIRED requested an interview with Slater several times, but his spokesperson said the surfer was unavailable due to his responsibilities in hurricane-stricken Hawaii.)
Two members of the USC faculty, Tony Maxworthy and Fred Browand, disagreed on whether this never-ending perfect wave was even feasible, Fincham says. The standoff ended with Browand slapping a note on Maxworthy’s office door, waving the white flag. They would attempt to make the wave. Fincham would take the lead on the project.
Browand, who is now retired and lives in a retirement community east of Los Angeles, tells me over the phone he doesn’t recall any specific disagreement about the circular wave. But, he remembers thinking at the time, “it’s a heck of a jump between doing something in a lab and generating a full-scale wave that would be surfable.”
“Adam is a smart guy, there’s no doubt about that, and he has a lot of imagination,” Browand says. “I’m impressed that he got this thing going from what started off as a 2-inch wave.”
After several months of testing that tiny wave, Fincham went down to the headquarters of Quiksilver, Slater’s sponsor at the time, and presented his findings. While Fincham says he lobbied at first to keep the tests going within the university laboratories, it was ultimately decided that they would move Slater’s wave out of USC, both for space and “for IP reasons.” It’s the technology, he says, that sets this place apart.
It’s obvious upon arrival at the Surf Ranch that Slater and team did not end up sticking with a circular wave pool.
From 2007 until 2012 they were married to that idea. Patent filings from that time show a circular pool with a fixed outer wall and a rotating inner wall equipped with one or more hydrofoils—winglike structures that move through the water to create movement and lift. The team constructed a circular prototype tank in a giant warehouse in Culver City. But from the start, it was a challenge, Fincham says. “The big problem when you’re going around in a circle is you have to make sure the water is calm by the time it comes around again,” he says. At some point, they determined that a linear wave pool would be easier, cheaper, and, importantly, quicker to build.
Kelly Slater Wave Co. purchased the 20-acre property in Lemoore in 2014. According to a report in Bloomberg, Slater chose Lemoore, a small city with a population of around 25,000, primarily because it was inexpensive. The property cost around $575,000, roughly half the price of a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco. The fact that two lakes already existed on the property also made it appealing. But if Slater was hoping for discretion when he chose Lemoore, which is located more than 100 miles from the California coastline, that part didn’t quite pan out: The internet has been in a frenzy about this man-made wave since Slater first started filing patent applications.
By 2015 the first version of the wave pool was operational. It is not open to the public for surfing, and may never be—although if you’re a Slater buddy, like Eddie Vedder or Tony Hawk, or a philanthropic organization, or an LA-based venture capitalist or tech executive with deep pockets, you can arrange an outing there.
In May 2016, WSL Holdings, the parent company of the World Surf League, bought Kelly Slater Wave Co., emphasizing its value as a practice facility and hinting at a future filled with competitive events. The ranch’s name technically changed to the WSL Surf Ranch, but almost everyone I spoke to for this story still calls it the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch.
In 2017, after an extensive overhaul, Surf Ranch 2.0 launched. Wave pool overhauls aren’t a matter of just tweaking the software or changing the location of a button. It means draining the entire lagoon, changing the contour of the bottom, fixing large pieces of equipment. It’s a massive, ongoing construction project. The Surf Ranch as it exists now, the 2.1 version, would look pretty darn good to any outsider; and yet it’s still considered a prototype.
This prototype is a giant, rectangular, freshwater lagoon, 700 yards long. Directly next to the lagoon is another freshwater lake, one that is still used for wakeboarding and paddleboarding. The area is surrounded by dozens of trees, some of them planted to create a buffer for wind, since wind affects the formation of the wave. This cluster of conspicuous trees is the only thing that gives the place away as you’re driving down Jackson Avenue in Lemoore.
Upon entering the Surf Ranch, it’s easy to drop into surf lingo: Everyone seems stoked to be there, and yet there’s a mellow vibe. There’s a gorgeous, airy, wood-paneled TV room where surfers chill out, watching video feeds from the wave pool and charging their phones. Framed photos of Slater and a few of his trophies serve as decor. The TV room opens up into the “boardroom,” where, in place of whiteboards and endlessly irritating teleconference systems, there are more than three dozen FireWire surfboards. Slater keeps a small quiver here too, in an open locker with his name on it.
The wave pool itself is jaw-dropping—not quite like standing on the cliffs at Nazaré, or what I’d imagine that to be, but stunning in its juxtaposition to the landscape. Here’s a glassy, 6-foot wave rising from the flat, dry grounds of Lemoore. The lagoon is filled with 15 million gallons of UV- and chlorine-treated water. At its deepest point, it’s 9 feet; at its most shallow point along the wave path, it's 3.5 feet. Alongside it, a 100-ton hydrofoil—covered by tarps—runs along a fence, like a locomotive. The hydrofoil is pulled by cables, which spool out of two winch drums on either side of the lagoon. (Fincham calls the housing for these winch drums the “twin towers.”) All of this is powered by an electric motor.
Even the lifeguards seem to be a part of the well-oiled machinery. On the day I’m there, they’re on Jet Ski duty for the surfers taking practice runs. This is all in preparation for the upcoming Surf Ranch Pro event. The lifeguards bark wave orders into their radios, as though they’re ordering up a burger. These calls are received in the control tower, an elevated shack over on the west side of the lagoon.
Up in the control tower, this Uberfication of surfing becomes even more apparent. Upon receiving the command from one of the lifeguards, a wave operator named Matt goes to a drop-down menu on the screen of a Siemens-made control system and selects a wave profile. He pushes a blue button and, just like that, launches a wave.
I’m a relatively new surfer myself, so I don’t get “barreled” at the ranch. Instead, I settle for a Jet Ski ride alongside Lakey Peterson, 23, and Griffin Colapinto, 20, as they surf. As we scoot along, I’m hyper-aware of the noisy hydrofoil lurking behind the wave—and the pool’s concrete bottom beneath it—but the 6-foot wave commands the same amount of respect as it would if were were in the ocean. Which is to say, this wave isn’t messing around. It’s powerful.
“One thing I do notice that’s different between this and the ocean is the speed of the wave,” Peterson tells me. “Here’s a little bit more ... unforgiving. If you catch a bit of an edge or a rail, this wave is just moving no matter what. Ocean surfing, the wave is moving no matter what as well, but generally they’re a little bit slower.”
The wave also wears surfers out. Carissa Moore, a three-time world champ, says she stressed her hamstring abductor at the ranch. (A lifeguard tells me that other injuries, like concussions, have occurred, and that the guard staff require surfers to use hand signals in the pool, so they can stay alert to more serious situations.) “It puts so much stress on the body,” Moore says. “As a surfer we paddle, probably, 40 percent of the time. The other 40 percent we’re sitting and 20 percent we’re surfing. And here it’s totally flipped. You use your legs so much more. You have to take breaks.”
“It’s cool, though,” Moore adds. “It’s just different.”
“The technology is incredible,” Peterson says. “I always say this is like the first iPhone, right? Who knows what this will be like when there’s an iPhone X version of this wave out here.”
Wave pools are not new. The first commercial wave pool in the United States, Big Surf, opened in Tempe, Arizona, in 1969. According to an article published that year in Life, its founder, a construction engineer named Philip Dexter, “could see surf breaking where others saw only 20 acres of sage-grown desert,” some 350 miles from the nearest ocean. Distance to ocean aside, you could say the same of Slater. Big Surf is still open for business. Disney has a wave pool, too, at its water theme park in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. It’s been around for nearly 30 years.
But over the past decade or so, a series of wave pools has popped up (see what I did there) that are promising better waves. Three of the more prominent examples include Slater’s ranch, scattered surf parks launched by Spain-based Wavegarden, and BSR Surf Park in Waco, Texas, which is powered by American Wave Machines technology. Words like “powerful,” “the real deal,” and, yes, “perfect” are used to describe these engineered walls of turbulence. Slater himself has characterized his wave as a “freak of technology.” These aren’t meant for bobbing around on your family vacation. These are designed for surfing.
That doesn’t mean they’re not also designed for fun or, more importantly, for profit. NLand, a surf park that opened in Austin in 2016, is open to the public. The park charges between $60 and $90 an hour for access to the lagoon, depending on the level of wave you’re looking to surf. Visitors can drink beer, practice yoga, or listen to a concert while they’re there.
“We try to add on other things, to make a place where people want to stick around,” says Doug Coors, the founder and chief executive of NLand. “I consider it similar to a ski area, where someone skis a bunch of black runs and someone else skis the green runs but they’re all enjoying a beer together afterward.”
For a place like NLand, the volume of waves is also critical: You have to churn out enough waves to make people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. For NLand this equates to around 24 waves an hour. But making waves is also power-intensive. Coors says the energy it takes to create a 30-second wave is equivalent to 10 V6 engines running for the same amount of time.
One could argue that it’s the quality, not the quantity, of the wave that really matters. And if you accept that premise, then it becomes a discussion of how it’s being made. Artificial waves can be generated in a variety of ways: with pistons, with air chambers, with paddles, with water itself, dropped or skimmed along a body of water to create surface waves. Another way of doing it is with hydrofoils, which is what Slater and Fincham are using. The contouring of the bottom of the lagoon is key too, since that impacts how the waves will shape up.
NLand has been using a hydrofoil system, as well. NLand is powered by technology developed by Wavegarden, the Spanish technology company that’s been making headlines in the artificial wave space as long as Slater has. The way chief commercial officer Fernando Odriozola describes it, the Wavegarden technology at NLand (as well as at another Wavegarden surf park in Wales) is “very similar” to the technology at the Slater ranch. For its future parks—and Wavegarden lists nearly 20 “coming soon” locations on its website—the company plans to switch to what it describes as a modular system, one that uses paddles.
I ask Fincham what makes the Surf Ranch’s hydrofoil system technically different from others. Basically, what makes the Slater wave so special?
Fincham and the World Surf League hate sharing these details. It’s why they’ve covered the hydrofoil system with tarps and topped it with solar panels, so drone operators can’t get a shot from above. Fincham volunteers that they’ve patented, specifically, “the method for generating the wave. It’s the hydrofoil in combination with the correct environment to make the wave.” Vagueness achieved.
Fincham stops just short of launching into a seminar on the Goring method, but that’s who he cites next: Derek Garard Goring, who, he says, developed a method of generating “very nice waves with a paddle.” Fincham and his team took inspiration from Goring in designing the shape of a hydrofoil, which pushes water in a way Goring would recognize. It doesn’t drive the water up at all; it only pushes it sideways. Control the water, control the wave.
Fincham stops our conversation again to stare at the wave, and I ask him what he’s looking for.
“I don’t want to see too much whitewater coming off the fence there,” he says, pointing to the part of the wave that’s closest to the fence. It’s that left again—a wave peeling to the left of the surfer—barreling toward the south side of the lagoon. Where there should be an unblemished, clean face of a wave, there’s a spray of surf shooting up in the direction of the hydrofoil apparatus.
“We saw it happen on one of the waves a while ago, and we’re trying to ascertain what control we have over it in this particular situation,” Fincham says. “This was designed to only make rights, and then we retrofit it to make lefts as well. So it’s not optimized for the lefts. It’s a weakness.”
The bigger concern is losing water with such spray: Fincham says that on a hot day like this one, a quarter of a million gallons of water can evaporate from the lagoon. The splashing makes that worse. The perfect wave, it turns out, is a constant work in progress, an infinite loop of maintenance.
Everyone has something to say about Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, both the ranch itself and what it represents: Man interfering with nature.
Some people have expressed environmental concerns, saying that if artificial waves usurp popular surf spots, it could deprioritize the resources and attention being given to the protection of coastal breaks. It’s almost impossible not to think about water in some way or another as you’re driving to Lemoore, where using 15 million gallons for a beautiful barrel might seem less stoke-worthy if you’re part of the drought-stricken agricultural community.
On my way to the ranch, along the I-5 corridor in the central part of the state, I pass more than a dozen signs lobbying for protections for surface water and aquifers, paid for by a group called Families Protecting the Valley. One such sign lives at the main intersection just before you get to the Surf Ranch.
Fincham points out the lagoon was a lake before they bought the place—“Nothing’s changed there,” he says—and that a golf course is much more water intensive than a surf lagoon. There’s a golf course right down the road here, he says, pointing northeast. And Fincham says the ranch sources its electricity from solar farms. “We have an arrangement with PG&E where we buy the solar energy.”
Coors, the founder of NLand in Texas, makes the same argument as Fincham on the topic of water usage. “Our lagoon is 14 acres, and we use less than a third of what a small 18-hole golf course would use in a year,” he says.
But mostly, people want to talk about soul when they talk about the Surf Ranch. Surfing is supposed to be about connecting with the ocean, the thinking goes. It’s about waiting for the perfect wave, not pushing a button and having it appear. It’s about counterculture, sticking it to The Man, tuning one’s inner self to nature’s metronome. If surfing is poetry, artificial waves are AI-generated verse.
A writer for Deadspin wondered whether man-made waves are the future of the sport or its “bastardization.” Outside described the wave pool future as “bleak,” and, since we’re all being honest here, a little boring. An article in Science reported that in the vociferous surf blogosphere surfers posit that wave pools “could breed obnoxious hordes of newbies who will further crowd ocean breaks.”
“When surfing becomes pasteurized, it loses its edginees,” says Peter Neushul, a surf historian and visiting researcher at UC Santa Barbara. “I think it’s going to lead to some conflict, depending on what you believe ‘surfing’ is. Is it bonding with nature, experiencing the last frontier of the ocean? Or is it hopping in a chlorinated tank with a foil being dragged around?”
Except the sport of surfing is also—and has been for a long time—about sponsorships, photo ops, and convincing inlanders that they too can possess an ounce of your beachy cool vibes if they just buy a sporty bikini, a branded T-shirt, a Baja hoodie. Surfing is a multibillion-dollar industry, and marketing executives will be damned if they don’t find a way to make the whole thing a little more ... predictable.
The debate will come into sharp focus in the run-up to the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where surfing will make its debut as an Olympic sport. While the International Surfing Association has issued a statement saying that the 2020 surfing events will take place in the ocean, at Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba, plenty of people have surmised that Olympic events beyond that could occur in some kind of wave pool, especially if the natural location doesn’t lend itself to good surf.
Sooner than that, though, is the Surf Ranch Pro in Lemoore, which kicks off tomorrow. It’s the eighth stop on the WSL’s Championship Tour. Nike-owned Hurley is sponsoring it, and the event will be broadcast exclusively on CBS, straight from the lagoon into your living room. On the day I visited there in August, a crew was already building scaffolding for the giant jumbotron.
“That’s why this is such a huge asset for the WSL, and for surfing,” says Peterson, the No. 2 female surfer on the tour. “You can schedule it. I can tell all my friends if they want to watch me, like, ‘Hey, I’m surfing at 10:32 on Tuesday morning.’“
But Peterson continues, “Which is sort of ... I always think in some ways that’s the beauty of the ocean, you know? You’ve got to wait on the ocean. And I hope we never lose that. But this is a great addition to that.”
That’s another word I hear a lot at the ranch: addition. The pro surfers I talk to aren’t interested in trashing Slater’s wave; that’s like asking NBA up-and-comers to critique LeBron James while hanging out at his house. They’ll give their honest assessment, but they’re quick to point out that it’s a great practice facility. “There’s haters for sure,” Moore says. “But it’s not going to take away from surfing the ocean. It’s an addition.”
What may be a valuable addition for pros could also be an opportunity for not-yet-pros—or never-pros, like me.
“I think this has the potential to cut through socioeconomic classes. Surfing has mostly reached a very narrow slice of our country’s demographic,” says Sachi Cunningham, a journalism professor and documentarian who is working on a film about female big-wave surfers. “If surfing becomes more accessible, it has the ability to cut through gender, race, disabilities.” (Both the Surf Ranch and NLand have hosted surf events for disability support groups.)
Really, surfing has benefited from technology for decades. Neushul, the historian, lays out a lot of these points in a book he coauthored called The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing. Everything from neoprene to foam to fiberglass to buoys that collect wave data for the military have, in some way or another, changed surfing.
“Surfing exploded in the post–World War II era, and that’s partly due to materials and technology,” he says. The Jet Ski I rode on that day at the ranch is a piece of technology that allows big wave surfers to be towed into monstrous waves, ones that were previously unconquerable.
Super-secret hydrofoil-generated barrels are, perhaps, just the next wave of technology to transform the sport. But, as I’m learning, how revolutionary it really is depends on who you ask.
Fincham, of course, believes it is revolutionary. It’s why he took on the project when a famous surfer he didn’t know anything about showed up at his lab and proposed the perfect wave. It’s why he keeps iterating on it, and why asking him about waves leads to an impromptu science project in the kitchen.
It’s why he wants to try building a bigger wave—maybe not 20 feet, since that would be dangerous, he says, but something that accommodates taller surfers. It’s why the WSL has “site identified” in places like Palm Beach, Florida; Australia; France; Brazil; Japan—because the organization believes this prototype can exist elsewhere.
It’s why he’s still obsessing over it now, that wave that’s showing just a little bit of whitewater where it shouldn’t. Fincham is nowhere to be found when I leave the Surf Ranch in the late afternoon, but there’s a good chance he’s off somewhere staring at that left, the one that’s not yet perfect.
1 Update, September 10: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the brand of the food storage container.
