The High Stakes of Surfing’s Wave-Pool Arms Race
In 2015, a rancher named David Howe lifted off from a California airfield on a covert mission. For weeks, a neglected water-ski park in his Central Valley farming community had been mysteriously ensconced in privacy fencing and manned by a security detail. The clandestine development raised eyebrows in town, but according to Howe, locals contracted to do work at the facility weren’t talking.
To quench his curiosity, Howe decided to sneak in an aerial view. In a helicopter normally employed in crop dusting, he and a friend rose over the lake, and saw something like a train car moving back and forth, causing a disturbance on the water’s surface. On a second pass, workers emerged from trailers below. “They looked mad,” Howe says. “We laughed at how hard they were trying to keep their secret.”
Trained as an engineer, Howe had no doubt what the train-car contraption was being used for: Whoever was behind the development was trying to generate oceanlike waves in a lake. This was an odd thing to build in a lightly populated community 100 miles inland. “We don’t have any surfers around here,” Howe says.
Later that year, the surfing legend Kelly Slater, was his “little secret spot,” a mechanism designed by his Kelly Slater Wave Company to create “perfect waves”—the kind surfers scour the globe to find. And now, if Slater’s plan worked, West Coast surfers could soon enjoy a dependable supply in landlocked Lemoore, California.
