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Every time a new wave pool is built, the surf world sits up and turns its eyes towards it. They are a wonder of engineering, no matter your stance on them, and in the last few years they’ve been popping up all over the place. The latest? Surf Abu Dhabi, where Caroline Marks tested the waters.
Although wave pools have been around for quite some time — the first one opened in 1934 at the Wembley Swimming Pool in London, they weren’t exactly great waves for surfing. Looking even farther back, Ludwig II of Bavaria built The Venus Grotto in the 1870s. It was “an underground labyrinth with aquatic passageways, boats and an electrified ‘wave maker’ of which very little is known.” Typhoon Lagoon came pretty close to getting it right, as did the Ocean Dome in Miyazaki, Japan, but it really wasn’t until Wave Garden entered the game that real, surfable waves became a reality.
Fast forward to today, and the technology is getting better and better. Wave pools using all sorts of different wave generating mechanisms are pumping out surf of extraordinary quality, taking the guess work out of a sport that has historically been notoriously difficult to predict. The latest, of course, is Surf Abu Dhabi, an enormous pool on Hudayriyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Using the same tech as the Surf Ranch in Lemoore, the wave there looks… well, it looks pretty perfect.
Since Surf Abu Dhabi started making waves, a handful of surfers have sampled its wares. Kelly Slater, Filipe Toledo, and Gabriel Medina are among them. So far, however, all the footage has been of the right, leaving some wondering what the left might look like. But Caroline Marks recently posted a video of herself surfing it, and as expected, the left looks just as good as the right.
“WOW,” she wrote on her Instagram post. “Congratulations on another incredible project! Thank you for having me and for the amazing hospitality.”
We’ve got a few feelers out to get more details about Surf Abu Dhabi, because we, like you I’d imagine, have questions. For now, however, it appears we’ll have to make do with the footage.
