The crème de la crème of the surfing world Kelly Slater last week announced he’d finally finished his 10-year project, a man-made wave in a top secret test facility. The surfing world says it’s a game-changer; we say it looks cool AF.
Naturally, surfers world-wide were thirsty to get inside Slater’s lair, and in a proud moment for Australians everywhere, it was a Sydney guy who found it: surf forecaster Craig Brokensha, who told PEDESTRIAN.TV that he basically did so because “there was no surf that day [last Saturday]”.
By the power of some serious internet sleuthing, he traced the wave pool to a former water-ski lake near Lemoore, about 50k south of San Francisco, CA, and wrote the whole process up for digital surf mag / his employer Swellnet.
Found it!
Posted by Craig Brokensha on Friday, 18 December 2015
“With all the tools freely available to us in this day and age (Google, Google Earth, Google Streetview) it only took an hour or so to confirm the likely location of the test facility,” he wrote on digital surf mag Swellnet.
Let’s break it down.
Step 1: ‘Surf’ Reddit. (Ed’s note: I’ll allow it.)
“Theories were already starting to fly across the internet, but a single rural satellite image with an interesting long, black rectangular shape was the starting point for my investigation.”
It is indeed located near Route 41 in Central Valley California.
Step 2: Deduce that the lake, which Google Maps confirmed pre-existed from at least 2013-ish, had only a few likely options for its existence.
“The only option I could think of was wakeboarding or water skiing. So I Googled the address along with the term ‘water ski’ to see if anything appeared. This brought up an interesting article stating the “Ski Lake Home” was sold in January 2014, right in the middle of the public battle to get the first wave pool up and running. ”
Step 3: Stalk the article about the sale. Note it says that real estate agent “Jim” had “a client who was interested in lake property and he was able to locate this incredible deal out in Lemoore,” and that “the biggest feature of the sale was the private lake that was attached to the land,” which is “a rare find“. Onya, Jim.
Step 4: Use Google Earth to confirm the lake underwent construction, taking it from water ski shab to wave pool chic.
Step 5: Use some straight-up Sherlock Holmes-level shit to cross-check visual markers from Google Streetview to Slater’s promo vid.
Step 6: ACTIVATE SHERLOCK MODE, BASK IN YOUR RIGHTEOUS GLORY.
P.TV got in contact with Craig to suss out just how sure he was that he’d hit the Kelly jackpot.
“Oh, 100%,” he told us. “It’s confirmed. After we published the article, local guys in the area went and sussed it out and took some shots that match what you can see in the video.”
He’s pretty certain Kelly – who hasn’t said anything publicly about the discovery – would be chill about it, too.
Look, it’s pretty unlikely any of us (and by ‘us’, this writer of course means ‘you, the surfers reading this article) will be getting inside the wave pool any time soon, but Craig speculates it *might* even be a test facility for further ones down the track. Hope remains eternal.
Source: Swellnet.
Photo: Kelly Slater Wave Co.
