The artificial reef at Middleton Beach transformed Albany’s surf scene. Photo: ABC//Screenshot
There’s a new wave on the coast of Western Australia, and it breaks over an artificial surf reef. The wave, which is described as a “perfect left-hand wave,” breaks off Middleton Beach, and it has been decades in the making.
Up until now, Middleton Beach wasn’t exactly surfable. The waves were mostly just big closeouts, but now all that has changed. Thirty years after a group of people did a feasibility study, the reef is officially making waves.
“We just felt that’s where we needed the juniors to have something decent to surf,” Peter Bolt, one of the most ardent supporters of the reef, told ABC, “in town where they can get access to it.”
It wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish. Bolt and the others who wanted the artificial reef were met with obstacles at nearly every point. The biggest, as you’d imagine, was the sheer cost of it. Couple that with the possible environmental impacts and the fact that other artificial reefs have generally been failures, and you’ve got an uphill battle.
“There was no money or desire to do anything beyond that [original feasibility study],” he said. “And in some ways that was a positive thing because the design was around using geo-textile bags and historically, when they have been used to build reefs or protect shorelines, they failed because they split, they settle, they move and that would have been a failed reef, another failed reef. So it was not bad timing in some ways, looking back in hindsight.”
In 2017, though, a guy named Greg Stocks was elected as the mayor of Albany. He cleared the path for a $5 million pledge, and the Southern Ocean Surf Reef began to finally take shape. A crew from New Zealand spent half a year building the reef, dumping some 70,000 tons of granite into a precise shape. And once it was done, it was clear they’d done it right.
“It’s a bit more challenging than expected,” Bolt said. “We were aiming for an intermediate wave, which it is when the swell is smaller, but as it gets bigger, it breaks out there and it’s fairly shallow. So it’s intermediate-to-advanced on most days.”
