Kelly Slater’s“perfect wave”nearly started as a surfing merry-go-round.
Before the 11-time world champ’s famed Surf Ranch became a 2,300-foot rectangular lagoon in Lemoore, California, the original plan was far more bizarre — a circular pool that would churn out a nonstop, spherical wave.
The idea sounded like science fiction, but after years of research and development, the team behind Kelly Slater Wave Company had to kill it.
The circular prototype had already been built when French engineer Alex Poirot joined the company in 2011. At the time, the operation consisted of just four people — Chief Technology Officer Adam Fincham, Chief Operating Officer Noah, lab technician Ken, and Poirot, who came on as the company’s first fluid mechanics R&D engineer, according toSURFER.
Poirot was suddenly in charge of “everything related to the water, wave generation, wave shape, bathymetry, and forces,” he told the outlet.
For the next three years, the prototype ran almost nonstop as the team tested how to create and control a breaking wave.
“My job was to understand how waves actually form and break, and more importantly, how to control them,” Poirot said.
That meant daily tests, hundreds of changes to reef geometries and hydrofoils, and measuring everything from wave profiles to velocities and forces.
The stakes were massive. The team was trying to scale a barreling wave from a small prototype to a full-scale, 6-foot-plus breaking wave — something Poirot said had never been done with that level of detail.
“If we were wrong, we wouldn’t just be slightly off, we’d miss the wave entirely,” he said.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
