There are few places as wild and beautiful as the coast of Raglan, New Zealand. On a windswept afternoon, great mountains of cold gray water roll in from the tempestuous southern Pacific. Their power is unfathomable: trillions of cubic feet of water traveling at 3 feet per second, unhindered for days across thousands of miles of open sea before crashing to shore. Riding them on a surfboard feels like waltzing with the most untamed and uncontrollable forces of the universe. Or, as Kerry Black yells when we climb out of the tumbling surf, "It’s ripping, mate!"
People like Black come from all over the world to play on Raglan’s storied waves, made famous in the classic surfing film The Endless Summer. A perfect, fast-moving, steeply breaking wave 8 feet high is that most evanescent of things - coveted, sought after, dreamed about, a serendipitous state of grace pursued to the ends of the earth because it’s so rare. The seabed shapes that produce these special waves are known as breaks in surfing lingo and are legends all: Places like Oahu’s Pipeline. Bali’s Bingin. New Zealand’s Raglan. And in early 2005, thanks to Black, these waves will be in steady supply at the Ron Jon surf park at the Festival Bay Mall in Orlando, Florida, open 6 am to midnight, 365 days a year, Visa and MasterCard accepted.
"I reckon that the pioneering search for the best breaks is just beginning again," says Black, peeling off his wet suit. "But this time it’s going to be on artificial surf."
Black, 53, appears every bit the aging hippie surf bum: unshaven, with unkempt hair and bushy eyebrows, wearing a baggy wool sweater full of holes. But this 35-year veteran of some of the world’s most remote beaches knows more about breaking waves than anyone. The archdruid of surf has undergrad degrees in math and geophysics. His master’s thesis - written in a house overlooking Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu - is a 240-page work titled "Wave Transformation Over Coral Reefs." His PhD thesis is even thicker: a two-volume tome called "Sediment Transport and Inland Tidal Inlet Hydraulics." Until two years ago, he was a professor of coastal oceanography and numerical modeling at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, and the list alone of his published scientific papers fills 60 pages. "Black’s work is groundbreaking," says Charles Finkl, director of the Coastal Education and Research Foundation in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Black has cracked the code of the world’s great breaks; they now lie dissected, quantified, and digitized in his computer, ready to be reconstituted anywhere - especially indoors. With the push of a button, his patented pool floors will morph into an almost infinite variety of shapes to produce steep 8-foot-high tubes that peel for 100 yards, or gentle 3-foot rollers that peak after 40, or waves that break to the left or right every 12 seconds, all under a transparent dome and available for a few bucks a ride.
"Mate, you’ll be riding real, world-class waves," says Black, tying his board onto the car. "There’ll be a reef, and the dynamics and breaking process will be the same. The social atmosphere will be the same - you’ll sit in the water and talk while waiting for a wave. Afterward, you’ll have a beer. It’ll be a complete parallel universe."
Russia, Israel, Romania - Black is fielding calls from developers across the globe interested in using his technology to create their own endless summer. Tacky as it may sound, reproducing a place like Raglan under glass in a suburban American mall could solve the sport’s great conundrum: too many surfers, too few good places to surf, and no way for the sport to grow - a necessity in the eyes of its promoters. Skateboarding and snowboarding, imitations inspired by the waveriding original, have long eclipsed their parent. Snowboarding, not even 20 years old, is already an Olympic sport. But how many people can jump on an airplane and head to Bali or New Zealand, or even southern California? Professional surfers want more prize money; the promoters who market them want the televised contests and commercial sponsorship that will happen only if the sport expands beyond its coastal parochialism. It doesn’t matter how yummy Kate Bosworth looks in Blue Crush - surfing will remain on the fringe as long as consistent waves are a distant dream to kids in Dubuque.
"A good pool would open up a whole new door to the sport," says 2001 professional world champion surfer C. J. Hobgood. There will always be the Tahitis and Fijis, he says, "but if you could surf in Middle America, it would introduce the sport to people who’ve never had that opportunity. It would be so rad!" And even in a place like Fiji, Mother Nature can ruin your plans. "I was in Tahiti last week," Hobgood says, "and the waves weren’t even a foot high."
"The only thing that’s held surfing back is geography," says Mitch Varnes, a former editor at Surfing magazine who now manages Hobgood and seven other professional surfers. "When municipalities started turning tennis courts into skateparks, skateboarding exploded. If the Orlando park lives up to expectations, there’s no reason it can’t be replicated in Detroit or Chicago, opening the sport up to explosive growth. How about the 2012 summer Olympics in New York City in a surf pool!"
While replicating Raglan in a building is not easy, basic wave pools are nothing new. The world’s first appeared in Tempe, Arizona, way back in 1969. Inject a shot of air into a flooded concrete chamber, known as a caisson, and a wave tumbles out of an underwater slot. Today, there are hundreds of such pools worldwide. A few - Walt Disney World’s Typhoon Lagoon, the Seagaia Ocean Dome in Japan, Dorney Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania - have even hosted surfing competitions. But, Hobgood points out, "The waves are mushy, don’t stand up, have no power, and dissipate quickly." And, unlike Black’s pools, they use fresh water, which is so much less buoyant that it requires a thicker board, reducing a surfer’s performance. "I’ve surfed Typhoon Lagoon a bunch of times," Hobgood says. "You get one maneuver and that’s it."
Contributing editor Carl Hoffman (carlhoffmn@earthlink.net) wrote about the X Prize in Wired 11.07.
Of course, natural waves often aren’t much better. "There are thousands of beaches that don’t produce good surfing waves," says Black, as we sip a midafternoon beer at one of Raglan’s two cafés, its tables all recycled surfboards. Figuring out how to reproduce the perfect wave is more a problem of science than of engineering. "You have to have an intimate knowledge of surfing and wave patterns that allows you to forecast how tubey or how fast a wave will be," says Black. "If it’s too slow or too fast, you can’t ride it. A section in a surfing wave is a short length of crest where surfers like to do their maneuvers. But how long is a section? It’s the same with breaking intensity or how heavy the wave is. None of the answers were known."
Black spent most of his life tracking down the answers, and now he’s turning his attention to creating the perfect synthetic wave, indoors or out. His data can be used to build offshore reefs - for coastal protection and to produce better surfing waves - as well as indoor pools. "I’ll show you," he says, striding across the street. We mount a set of wooden stairs to the offices of Black’s company, Artificial Surf Reefs (above a surf shop, naturally), which last year earned $2 million doing everything from writing sediment reports for corporations and countries around the world to designing offshore reefs for the US Army Corps of Engineers (which plans to build an ASR reef in Ventura, California, this summer to prevent beach erosion and restore a popular surfing site). ASR is the largest employer in this surfing mecca of 3,500. Eleven guys with PhDs and master’s degrees - all former grad students of Black’s - are hunched in front of computers in a sprawling, high-ceilinged loft whose walls are decorated with surfing posters and the framed abstracts of arcane scientific papers ("Wave Mechanisms Responsible for Grain Sorting and Non-Uniform Ripple Distribution Across Two Moderate Energy Sandy Continental Shelves," reads one). "We don’t know if we want to expand, because it takes away from surfing," Black says. "It’s all about lifestyle."
On a Dell computer at his desk, Black calls up 3-D digital models of one of the world’s first artificial offshore reefs, being built on Australia’s Gold Coast out of 20-ton plastic bags of sand. Designed by Black and more than halfway completed, it’s already getting good reviews from surfers. The image on his screen looks like a pair of angel wings lying underwater off a white sand beach. "The reef is a wedge-shaped, double-sided headland split in half," Black explains, and the waves and currents it generates are as precisely modeled as the hull of an America’s Cup yacht. There are sections along the beach for swimmers, boogie boarders, and surfers, from beginning through advanced, each with its own takeoff zone. A channel bisects the reef, providing a calm area to paddle through after your ride. Black clicks his mouse and digital swells hit the reef, rising into waves whose height, breaking angle, speed, and shape are designed to his standards. "To get a really clean wave with a hollow tube, you’ve got to get all the elements right," he says. "But when you do, there’s no difference between the ocean or a pool. The waves abide by the same laws of physics. It’s inescapable."
It’s evening, and Black is hosting a dinner party with his girlfriend and a few guests at his house just blocks from ASR. As he throws a couple of fresh red snapper on the grill, Black talks about his quest to decipher the physics of surfing. It’s one that’s taken him more than 30 years, most of which had more to do with mundane coastal dynamics and oceanography than with surfing per se."Before you can understand surfing reefs," he says, "there’s so much other knowledge you need. Wave dynamics. Sediment transport. Computer modeling. I was really in a long process to get those things before I could start on surf breaks."
The search started when he was 14 and first began riding the waves near his home in Melbourne, Australia. By his late teens, Black was roaming the coast of New South Wales, sleeping on the beach. Unlike your average surf bum, he was driven by a restless intellectual passion every bit as powerful as his instinct for finding the sweet spot in a tube. For him, academia and surfing weren’t mutually exclusive. All those days out on the water were like tinkering in a vast and complex laboratory. Every swell brought not just a good ride but a wave of big questions: Why was one so much better than another? What made one tubey, another mushy?é
Twice during his undergraduate days he bailed out for six months of nonstop surfing. But he also finished top in his class, with a specialty in rip currents. Instead of settling down, he flew to Amsterdam and took the scenic route across Europe and Asia, toting his surfboard on public transportation and ending up in Bali for a six-month marathon at the fabled Uluwatu break. "If you’re going to do beach research, getting thrashed about in the ocean is a great way to understand it better," he says, brushing the hair out of his eyes and uncorking another bottle of Kiwi red. "You feel its power and see the sand banks changing, and that adds a lot to the science. And you sit in the surf, waiting for a wave, dreaming about what’s underneath you and how good it would be to make a perfect wave."
After getting his master’s at the University of Hawaii, he took off surfing again. But all those questions remained. So he looked at a map. Raglan, known as one of the world’s 10 best breaks, was a short hop from the University of Waikato, in Hamilton. Black dashed off a handwritten note asking if he might come to the university for his PhD. There, in 1983, he produced for his doctoral thesis the world’s first computer model simulating the movement of sand along the ocean floor. "It was at the cutting edge of science," Terry Healy, research professor of coastal environmental science at Waikato, tells me later.
Over the next decade, Black pumped out hundreds of scientific papers while directing the Victorian Institute of Marine Science in Melbourne and honed his numerical modeling skills on projects for the government and the oil and gas industry. Unromantic stuff, but Black collected reams of data, which he fed into increasingly sophisticated digital models of his own design.
Then came the offer of a full professorship from his PhD alma mater. Kerry Black’s time had come. He had the tools and background, and now the resources, to figure out exactly what lay beneath his surfboard. Naturally, Black was swamped with eager grad students. Guys like Shaw Mead, who, when he met Black, had just earned a master’s in marine biology and a back covered with fresh wounds from being thrashed on a reef in Tonga. Mead became Black’s principal researcher, and between 1995 and 2000 the two men traveled the Pacific Rim with a black box they named Horatio containing a GPS receiver and a depth sounder. All told, they created detailed contour maps of 43 of the world’s greatest surfing reefs. (Mead now helps Black run ASR.)
Mapping the reefs was only the beginning. Black deciphered and quantified every aspect of surfing. He identified seven geological components that appear in some combination in every major reef, then calculated which of the world’s big-name reefs have which combinations. He also figured out how to predict the breaking intensity of waves and the peel angle - the speed at which the wave breaks across its face - and which skill level of surfer could handle which peel angle. He calculated the maximum speed a rider could surf. He fed all this data into his suite of proprietary models. Ultimately, Black could identify, classify, and name the ingredients of each type of breaker, and that meant he could begin trying to replicate them.é
The snapper and several bottles of wine long gone, Black casually sheds his clothes and saunters naked past his dinner guests to a hot tub outside. An hour later, everybody heads downtown to hear some live music, and Black and his girlfriend hit the dance floor. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, eyes closed, his hair tousled, Black looks every bit the mad professor, and it’s easy to understand the next step he took in his career. By 2001, more than half the graduate students in the Waikato earth sciences department were in his program, and Black had published more than 600 scientific papers, but the university was balking at his requests for more research money. "Try getting a uni to give you a Jet Ski," he says. "I’d hit the top of academic achievement but felt like a round peg in a square hole. I wanted freedom." He left Waikato, moved to tiny Raglan, and opened ASR, where he could feed his passions as he wished.
Black originally set out to create artificial reefs that would enhance coastal protection and surfing. Then along came Jamie Meiselman. The 34-year-old developer grew up in New Jersey, 45 minutes from the beach, and he loved all board sports. But as every East Coast surfer knows, good waves are few and far between. "We spent way too much time thinking about surfing instead of doing it," Meiselman says. At Dartmouth; at the Burton snowboard company in Burlington, Vermont; at Columbia for his MBA - this was the story of his life: The beach was always a few hours away, the waves on his mind but too rarely beneath his feet. "As a kid I’d boogie-boarded Dorney Park, and the idea of a pool where you could really surf just popped into my head," he says. Meiselman poked around and in 1999 found Kerry Black.
Black put his computers to work and started tinkering in his garage with a 1:15-scale model. Before long, he came up with a wedge-shaped pool whose converging sidewalls compressed the wave to maintain its height, and a floor, floating on a bed of air, whose shape could be contoured using a system of 200 cables to mimic the complex curvature of the world-class reef he’d modeled.
Meiselman licensed Black’s technology, created Surfparks, and approached Aquatic Development Group, the largest designer and manufacturer of wave pools in the world. ADG was old school; Black’s digital models were all well and good, they said, but let’s see one for real. They ponied up the R&D money to construct a larger scale model, and Meiselman signed Ron Jon’s, the world’s biggest chain of retail surfing stores, to be title sponsor and build the park’s surf shop.
Four years after first making contact with Black, Meiselman leads me into a drafty warehouse in upstate New York containing a wedge-shaped, Black-designed plywood pool, a 1:8-scale model 12 feet wide and 35 feet long. The floor slopes upward like a traditional swimming pool, and a headland reef runs perpendicular to the wave. An ADG technician hits a switch, activating 10 vacuum pumps that suck water into caissons.
Suddenly the water at the head of the pool recedes, just as it does when a real swell begins to curl, and there’s a loud burp. Water surges forward, hits the tapering wall and sloping seabed, and curls into a steep, fast-moving, foot-high tube. Burp, swish. Burp, swish. Burp, swish. One after another, the world’s most consistent surfing waves roll down the pool, each a carbon copy of the one before. "It’s a hypnotically perfect barrel, and it’s what no one has ever seen before in a pool," says Meiselman. "For a surfer, one second in the tube feels like a lifetime, and they’ll be inside one of these for 10 seconds. Any time of day, any day of the week, any season. And they’ll be alone, one surfer, one wave. That’s what every surfer wants, to be able to drop in on a wave and have it all to yourself. You go around the world to find that. It’ll be the ultimate experience."
On the other side of the world, Kerry Black is bent over his desk when word gets around town: The surf is up. We tie a couple of boards onto the car, and in 10 minutes we’re at the breaks. It’s raining, with great gray clouds skidding across the horizon. The rollers bending at the headland are 12-footers so fast only a couple of guys getting towed in by Jet Ski can catch them. "Shit-A, mate, it’s giant!" Black yells, slipping into his wet suit. They’re way too big for me, though, so after a while Black takes us to Raglan’s long black sand beach. There, with no headland to refract the swells, there’s just broken 4-foot-high surf. But as small as it is, the undertow is ferocious, the breakers’ power so strong I can barely paddle out, the water so cold I’m shaking, even in my wet suit. I’m getting tossed around like a piece of driftwood, half drowned, but Black is glowing, beatific.
"Mate," he says as we pad onto the beach, "I reckon the world always looks better after a good surf. If we were in the pool, we could just get you a nice little wave to practice on." Black stops, drops his surfboard in the sand, and cocks his head. "You know," he says, staring out to sea, "I reckon I could build you a circular pool and you could surf forever."
credit Photograph by Anthony Mandler
Black, on the beach in Raglan, New Zealand, combines a passion for the ocean and a career in hard science in his Artificial Surf Reefs technology.
credit Courtesy Whitewater West Industries Ltd.
Old-school pools like this one in Taiwan pump out weak, mushy, bogus waves.
credit Photograph by Anthony Mandler
Black and ASR colleague Shaw Mead spent five years collecting precise data from 43 big-name surfing reefs. Mapping was the easy part.
credit Lightspeed Commercial Arts
How artificial surf works
Kerry Blackés pool designs get their punch from data-rich computer models of the best surf spots around the globe and from fully adjustable, contoured floors. Hereés the way his waves are created.-C.H.
1. Every nine seconds, vacuum pumps suck water into chambers called caissons. Powerful fans force water out of the caissons and into the pool to create a wave.
2. When the wave hits the upward-sloping reef, it falls forward and begins to break, following the contour lines of the reef.
3. Tapering pool walls keep the wave at a uniform height as it travels down the length of the pool.
4. Undertow is eliminated because as the wave dissipates, the water flows into channels running along the sides of the pool.
