Want a wave pool in your back yard? It might be on the horizon. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Way back in 2011, when wave pools as we know them now were just a glimmer in the eye of a few wacky inventors, I spoke with the founder of Wavegarden, Jose Odriozola. We talked about the little pool he’d built in the Basque Country — a tiny proof-of-concept that was the precursor to the wildly impressive technology that’s now in wave pools around the world. I asked him back then whether it would ever be possible for the layman to have a wave pool in his backyard.
“We’d like to think that it is too complicated, but you never know,” Odriozola answered. “It’s taken us a long time of research and development… Regarding the idea of having your own Wavegarden, it definitely needs too much money and too much room for the average surfer to have your own private Wavegarden.”
Well, enter The Wave Source, a scrappy little group that’s “designed to be radically more affordable to build and significantly more energy efficient. Our innovation empowers developers and partners to achieve higher profitability while delivering authentic surf experiences in scalable environments.”
Which means, of course, that maybe, just maybe, at some point in the distant future, that private wave pool in your backyard might be a possibility. Not with Wavegarden technology, but with Wave Source technology. The pool you see in Ben Gravy’s latest YouTube offering is a test pool in an Arizona backyard.
The pool, which took the owners a little over two months to build, required a lengthy permitting process that lasted two years. The wave travels around 200 feet along the wall, and although the left isn’t being ridden in Gravy’s video because it splashes the water out of the basin, there is indeed a left.
“About a month ago I received a random DM about visiting a wave pool that was built in a guy’s backyard,” Gravy wrote. “The pictures weren’t very impressive and I had no way of telling how big the waves were, but as the novelty guy of course I agreed to visit. When I arrived in Arizona and got to experience the first set, my perspective changed immediately. It was a massive layout with 3-4-foot perfect waves pumping through on command.”
