[00:00:19] Speaker A: Welcome to Barrel Surf podcast Namu. Here with you today, Abami Summers afternoon in yelling up Western Australia. Got a big show for you today, a brand new episode. And as usual, to my right, Mr. Adam Kennedy Azi.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: G'day, mates. Yes, very warm Sunday summer afternoon. So warm, in fact, we had to move out of the shedquarters, relocate, relocate into the treehouse. So we're in the kids treehouse. The boys helped me clean up and it was covered in jarrah flowers. Been snowing yellow jarrah flowers the last couple of weeks. Like some days you come out here and it literally looks like it's snowing. The summer is in full effect. Very hot, dry summer over here this year, and we're up in the treetops where there's a very light breeze and a couple of cold, cheeky monkeys to help us get through the afternoon. But we do have some beauty. Very special guests to join us in the treehouse, which is, we do got some pretty exciting news as well. So why don't you take it away, nami?
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Well, we've heard about this guy for a few years now, and he's a good friend of former guests on the podcast who also joins us today. Mr. Benny McCarthy, we had an episode a little while back called Original Wave Park Gangster. Don't know how our other guests will feel about that. Welcome to the show. Mr. Andrew Ross, an originator from the Wave pool world and current CEO of adventure. You're CEO, aren't you?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Chairman, mate.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Chairman, yes. Andrew Ross, welcome to the show.
[00:01:47] Speaker C: G'day, boys. Lovely to meet you.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Thanks for coming on board, mate. Original, original Wave park gangster is with us as his original wave park gangster. Benny. Andy, Wave Parks is something that really sort of gets the passion, gets the blood sort of going in people.
I know there's a bit of history about the sort of way park saying, can you give us a bit of a background in the whole thing, man?
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure, budy. So wave pools, there's like a distinction you can make. There's been wave pools in the past, and they're kind of like man made bodies of water that create ocean like conditions for bathers. And now what we've got is surf parks. And surf parks is where you're trying to create authentic surfing waves for surfers, which is the distinction. The only reason that surf parks have come around really, is because computing power has increased so much over the last sort of 20 years or so that you can start modeling all the intricacies of a surfing wave. Computers and all the different engineering, programming systems. I'm not an engineer, but all the different systems they use to kind of model these waves, you couldn't actually do it before, but now you can. So it's been a really interesting, I've been in the space for about twelve years now and I came from a different background. I was a lawyer and then an investment banker, and then I was a public company CEO for oil companies, which were someone described as the evil trinity of jobs.
If I didn't do anything fucking good with my wife, I was kind of fucking hell.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: I reckon you got 20 years of wave pools to try to redeem. Square one.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: That's it.
I turned 40 and I thought, I want to do something else. I'm sort of a bit over the oil and gas space. So yeah, just came across this news article where Kelly and Greg Webber were having a dispute over a circular wave.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: I remember seeing that, the endless wave.
[00:03:43] Speaker C: That's it. And so I thought, this is really interesting. And I kind of kept an eye on this kind of technology space for a long period of time. And so I contacted Kelly's group, found out what they were doing and then contacted Greg, met up with him in Sydney, found out what he was drawing, and through that process discovered the wave garden guys in Spain and that sort of started the journey. So it's been a really interesting past decade just seeing how the technologies have changed and as it's kind of moved towards something that's both commercial but sustainable and provides really, truly authentic surfing experiences for surfers. Yeah.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: And what about the circular wave pool with endless waves? Is that dead in the water, you might say.
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Well, yeah, look, it's a bit fanciful.
There's science and then there's science fiction, and this kind of falls in a bit of science fiction. All of us as kids, we would have hopped in a swimming pool and then walked around the outside and create a bit of a whirlpool. Whirlpool, yeah. That's exactly what would happen if you have a circular pool and you can't dissipate the wave energy. And what happens is the wave accelerates faster than the device that's making it and gets away from it. Yeah. Right. So then you can't control the shape of the wave and just gets faster and faster.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Sick.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Doesn't work.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Drowning all over, people drowning and flying out the edges.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: So there's been kind of an evolution in thinking around surf parks over the last decade or so. And you start with that circular one. You then moved to the pump and dump systems where they pump these big chambers inside a big concrete wall full of water. They open like a sluice on the bottom and the water all rushes out and creates this big wedgy wave.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Is that like the chinese, those chinese videos where you can't even see the water?
[00:05:20] Speaker C: It's just like, that's it.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Just 2000 people on human rubber ducking everywhere. That's that style, isn't that style?
[00:05:25] Speaker C: The water adventure one in Dubai is like that as well. And that's kind of good. But big lumpy wave to start with. But because you're not putting any more energy into the wave as it propagates out from that wall, it just reduces in size and shape and speed and power the further it goes. So it'll start off at like about 3 meters high, and within about 30 meters, it's about knee high. So the surf lakes one, the big plungery one, that kind of suffers from that as well, does it? And then it moved from there into the wave foil type technologies. And Kelly's is kind of pinnacle of. You use this massive, dirty, great big foil to displace water.
It's really inefficient, so it can lift up lots of water at once. But the wave that it makes, it's kind of like a boat wake. A boat wake. If you think about it coming behind a boat, if you look at it from above, it's got a concave. Sorry, a convex shape. So like the outside of a bowl, if you look a bowl upside down and on that curved surface. I got my hand up in front of the boys here, just sort of showing them on that curved surface. It's really hard to surf. Like it's trying to push you off either into the white water or if you get too far across onto the shoulder, there's no energy there and you're kind of coming off the back. We all surf on concave waves. They wrap around points or whatever, and you create a bowl, and it's much easier to sort of create tubes from that perspective. So we've moved from the wave foil technology, now we're into sort of more modular style technologies which create these concave shaped waves which are more authentic.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah, sick. And mate. What about the bottom contours? Obviously, there's all sorts of cool stuff, but, like, watching pipe today when it was sunny and glassy and clear, and you're getting all those drone shots, and you're getting such a cool view of.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: The reef and amazing. Hey, the reef.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: And you're just like, mate. It almost looks like there's no shape to that reef, aside from the actual channel going on the left, but on the right, and then there's like holes in it and cracks in it, and you're just like.
You wonder sometimes how it can consistently not close out. Obviously there is close outs, but you sort of wonder how it does it, because you look at, say, somewhere like JBay or something like that, and if you had a drone shot of that, you'd just see the contour just going all the way down. But when you see somewhere like that, that's just got holes and all that sort of stuff in it. What sort of contours are you guys looking at in your park?
[00:07:43] Speaker C: The contours. It's probably the secret sauce in all the different technologies in doing surf parks. Actually, what they call it is the bathymetry. So it's the bottom profile of the lagoon, and it's designed to mimic those reef structures. So if you look at pipeline and a few of the other famous reefs around the world, they've done lidar surveys on that, so they've taken drone shots over it, and they can map individually all of the reef, so you can see what it all looks like. And you've got those really interesting little channels that sort of run through the reef pipe, allows water to sort of drain out and through. And so a lot of that kind of natural environment tries to be replicated in these man made environments. So, for instance, the technology we're going to be using, waveguarden Cove, there's, I think there's six or seven coves now built around the world, including the one in Melbourne that we built that has a fixed bottom profile. And the trick then is to push the water towards these different sort of planar shapes that you've got, like, different geometry shapes in the floor to create different waves. And so if we want like a long, kind of peeling, more point breaky style wave, then we push the water towards this part of the lagoon floor, lifts up and creates a certain breaking wave. Want something that's a bit more steep, a bit more slabby, then what we do, and this is the modular technology, allows you to do this. You can push the water in different waves, you push it towards another part of the floor, lifts up even steeper, and it breaks with a little more intensity.
The floor is really important. Yeah.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: And just concrete. Is that what the. So I guess we probably haven't mentioned it yet, but one of the main reasons we got Andrew on here, aside from all things surfing and froth, is there's a wave pool going on in Perth that's been in the plans for a while and it looks like it may be coming to fruition and hopefully we got some news on that. But what bottom is it going to be up there? Is it just a concrete bottom?
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Yeah, it's an interesting one. So the bottom profile has to sort of stay the same, but what you use the materials to construct it change depending on the geotechnical, like the type of soil you got, whether you're building on rock or sand or clay or something else, you need to create this pavement, this floor, that can withstand the plunging force of the waves. And we'll do like 3 million waves a year over the top of this floor. And it hits with up to like 100. Well, I won't go into all that.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Shit, but it's like, hits hard.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: It's hard. And consistently and consistently. And you got this swept force of water just rushing.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: We have the great australian bite.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: So you got to match that kind of pavement design to your soil conditions and then to be able to withstand the forces within the lagoon itself.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: We didn't want to get too technical there, but I am quite curious what the soil profile is up in Coburn, where you're looking at building.
[00:10:28] Speaker C: Yeah, cockburn.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Just a whole bunch of leftover foreskins just rubbed off on the ground in Cockburn, mate.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: You put enough foreskins together, you get a good wave, get a good reef.
[00:10:42] Speaker C: I'll have to send that idea to all the technical guys, see what they reckon.
The soil we got up there, it's kind of interesting. It's just like a gray kind of silica sand, but it's got some kind of like slightly softer organic stuff partway down. And so we have to think about that.
The worst thing you want is for part of the lagoon to subside over time. You just hit it enough times, it kind of falls and drops. So we just have to make sure that we can reinforce it so that over that design life of 20 years or so, you only get a minimal amount of movement, so you don't get any breaks and cracks.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: So here's a question for you. With the soil profile in Melbourne, has there been any movement in the bottom contours there?
[00:11:26] Speaker C: Yeah, so Benny's sitting here on my left. Ben was our development director for the Melbourne project. He and I were in the trenches there for such a long time trying to solve that. And that just shows the thinking. In the surf park space over time, we thought we actually had decent soil, but it wasn't. It was shit. And it was like the fucking hardest thing I think I've ever done in my life, trying to work out how to solve for that soil. So we had this expansive clay, and so if you drop any water on it, the thing just froths up like a fucking souffle. And then if you dry it, just.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Fucking Melbourne crack cracks like a motherfucker.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: And it's just so tight.
And we're trying to put this massive body, 26 million liters of water on top of it and then hoping it never leaks, which they always leak. So the problem we'd have is if you have a little crack, the clay soil will expand around it and then it'll perpetuate the crack worse.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:12:19] Speaker C: So we spent so much time just trying to solve for that and got a good solution in the end. And I think, let me guess, silicon. Silicon.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: I am a plumber, mate.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: There is a bit of, like, there's a ton of sickens products involved.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: The whole thing is great.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Pipe silicon and duct tape just holding these parks together because that's all my houses are getting held together with. Maybe there's a job for me at the wave park I could be on.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: That's it. Well, we had to. So just to be slightly technical, the soil was going to expand and contract a little bit if it got wet and dried out. And so we had to have a floor that was sufficiently weak that it would bend without cracking if it expanded, but was strong enough to withstand all the plunging forces, the waves moving through there. So there was a really fine balance to try and get a solution to that. We got it in the end and the floor is doing really well.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Must be hard, eh? Like, you're listening to some of this stuff and we're probably brushing the surface on these technicalities. And meanwhile, you got all us monkeys on the Internet just going, make it bigger, longer. What are you doing? Build more of them.
[00:13:26] Speaker C: Hurry up.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Why is it taking so long, mate?
[00:13:29] Speaker C: You got all of us saying the same thing.
We're going to the technology guys and the engineers saying, stop being so fucking conservative. We want to do bigger. Come on.
But when we went through it with Melbourne, it was like the first time it ever been built. Full scale commercial, that waveguard and cove, and that was like 2019. We did first waves. Got to surf the very first wave. I'll tell you about that in a minute.
We had like, probably 1000 different major serious problems and questions we had to answer all the way through that build, and that's probably not understating it. And so you never want to be in that situation. When you're trying to build something. And we were just doing really novel stuff and trying to solve shit on the fly all the time. So it was big shout out to the team, the development team that was involved in that with us. It was a pretty hectic build period.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Five years later, it's still going strong. So the Melbourne wave pool is extremely popular.
Before we do move on, when are we expecting. This is the question everyone once answered. When are we expecting the Perthwave pool to open?
[00:14:33] Speaker C: So at this stage, I'm hoping we're going to get it open by about the first quarter of 2026. So probably what's that, two years from now?
I hope I'm not being too optimistic there, but I think that's probably about the time frame. So we got a couple of years to wait. Yeah.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Okay, interesting.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: We better hurry up because one of barreled podcast favorite sons, Billy Gibson's, just rolled in from probably another day in the salt water. And mate, he needs to get a taste of this. He's been surfing here for 60 years and he needs to get in before his body gives out.
[00:15:06] Speaker D: I'm listening to the contours of the bottom and I'm just going, what's pushing the water? Oh yeah, that's my question.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Let's go a bit close up, Billy.
[00:15:19] Speaker D: I surfed North Wales, Snowdonia, 15 years ago and that was my first experience with this sort of thing. The player through the middle of the wave and left hander, right hander. Great experience.
And if you're in England, it's probably a great experience. A really good experience, know, especially in the middle of winter.
And I was just wondering, I know the bottoms are contoured.
What's the force behind it?
[00:15:55] Speaker C: So there's a couple of different ways that people are using to push the water. So you can use like hydraulic force, which is where you use fluids to move something to then push the water out. You can use pneumatic force, which is using air to compress air into a space and then that pushes the water out. Or you can use electromechanical, which is what we use. And so the electromechanical, the way I describe it to people, if everyone's sort of familiar with what that wave garden cove looks like in Melbourne, it's kind of like a baseball diamond shape. So where the catcher would be in baseball, that's the start of the wave generator. It's like this big pier structure goes up through the middle. And within that peer structure in Melbourne, there's 46 modules. And those modules have an electric motor connected to a gearbox. And that gearbox is connected to a rack and pinion system. And that rack and pinion is affixed to a carriage. And that carriage runs to the left and the right inside that pier structure. And then hanging off that little carriage is a big, dumb rectangular box. So three and a half meter tall by half a meter thick by about a meter and a half wide, I think. And those big, dumb rectangular boxes is what pushes the water left and right. So if you imagine dominoes lined up. So rather than them being lined up back to back, put them kind of edge to edge in your mind. And that's the orientation of all of those big, dumb boxes in the water. So if we want to create a wave on the right. So the right hand breaking wave, what you do is you just get all of those boxes, and then you just push them in sequence out to that right hand side. It's almost like your arm in the water. If you put your arm in the water and you kind of sweep it like that with your hand at the end, and depending if your elbow moves faster or your hand moves faster, you change the peel angle of the water going into the lagoon, which then creates a different type of wave. Sick.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Pretty much just sounds like a one. Eight, six Kingswood there. Rack and pinion.
[00:17:47] Speaker D: And God has come a long way from what I rode. It was just a plow through the middle of a square pool, basically.
[00:17:56] Speaker C: That's it.
You've got one kind of degree of freedom with those ones with the wavefoils, because you can either accelerate or slow down the foil. That's it. And the bottom profile is the same for the new modular systems. You can change the. At least for the COVID you can change the stroke length of each of these pistons. You can change the stroke speed, but you can also then change the sequencing of all of them, how they work together. And then that's the way that unlocks it to create different types of waves. Different shapes of waves. Yeah.
[00:18:26] Speaker D: This is just technology. In the last ten years, really. It's just come so far.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: It's pretty remarkable. Technology has curves as well, like that sort of j curve, where. Well, I think they call it an s curve, where you start at the bottom and everyone sort of struggles a bit, and then you have this rapid acceleration and it sort of levels off. I think we're probably at that point where it's kind of starting to level off. I'm not sure there's going to be a ton more breakthroughs in technology in surf park space. And now it's going to be refinement. Can you build it cheaper? Can you operate it more efficiently? Can you design and build these things much more environmentally, sustainably?
Can you improve the experience? Maybe not technically, but through the guest experience within the park and how you're coaching and training and using these things to their best advantage?
[00:19:13] Speaker B: The million dollar question that you probably just get sick of answering, but how big are the waves going to be? Are they going to be bigger than any other park? Because a lot of the time in the hype and the media, it's like, mate, it's going to be bigger. And like Dubai, the new Slater pool, it's going to be bigger and that, but it's not bigger. It's the same in legit surfers terms. How big are you expecting the waves to be in the Perth wave park?
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So the Perth one, slightly different to Melbourne in that we'll have 56 modules for the wave generator rather than 46 they got in Melbourne. So what that gives us the opportunity to have longer waves, like longer barrel sections. And having more modules gives you more freedom to kind of create and hold the wave and manipulate it better. So overall, I think we'll have better quality waves, perhaps, than what we are able to do in Melbourne at the moment.
In terms of wave height, it'll probably be just a touch bigger than Melbourne. I wouldn't want to claim it to be much more than two to just over 2 meters face height.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Face height.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: So you're talking three to three foot. Three foot.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Sort of two to three foot at the wave pool in Melbourne. From what I've seen mostly, you know.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: Why it's two foot.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: I mean, you guys always bang on about how much of a small wave dave I am, but I was actually quite surprised at not necessarily the wave height, but a couple of times I sort of nosedived a couple of waves and went down and then the wave coming towards me, I was sort of surprised at the size of the whitewash.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: I wasn't scared or anything, I promise.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Did he get food poisoning?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: But, yeah, I was actually surprised at the height of the whitewater.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: They always look bigger when you're laying in front of it after a wipeout, don't they? As it's coming towards you, I found.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Well, probably, yeah, you're right there, but no.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: So a bit of heat on it. And that's in the Melbourne one, in the white water.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I was surprised.
Didn't have the wipe out of my life or anything, but I was more than you thought. Certainly got pushed around a little bit. Little bit of turbulence there. And yeah, it was surprised me. I went, oh, fuck. I've just got worked a little bit there.
[00:21:27] Speaker C: Yeah. But they have the biggest wave that they do in Melbourne, just in public sessions, is called the t six setting in the advanced waves session. And that's sort of like about 2 meters. And it sort of takes off a little deeper back in the back of the pool. You can push in more volume of water into the peak of the wave as it's breaking.
And that's sort of like the biggest one. It's interesting, when you run the beast, which is the slabby barrel setting, the wave is actually lower than the big turn setting. Because if you imagine it like a slabby barrel, kind of like, it kind of forms and breaks, but it throws forward, it surges more. Yeah, surges more and throws forward. And so then the relative height of it is actually a little lower than the big turns wave.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Because I'm not very good at squatting in small barrels and I'm scared of big barrels. So I just need that perfect 3.9 meters. 3.9 foot barrel.
[00:22:24] Speaker C: That's it.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: 3.9 to 4.3 foot is what I need. Any bigger, I'm scared. Any smaller, I can't fit.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: I think I told you about this too. When I surf the advanced session and the first half an hour of it, I was going, oh, these takeoffs are quite steep. I was actually lucky because there was only five of us in the session. It was a 02:00 on a Tuesday or something. And yeah, I was going, oh, shit, this is quite sleep on these. And then I said to one of the guys who was there, Melbourne chap, I said, mate, a little bit worried. I've missed a couple of drops here. Bit worried about when they turn the barrels on. He said, no, no, it's fine. It's more of a roll in when the barrels start. And I talked to you about the wave height of the Whitewood, I was surprised at how far the barrel setting actually throws out. It's actually wider than you probably realize.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: You had to fit your six four frame in there because you can't squat down that very low either.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's probably even less than I could when I was in the wave pool a couple of years ago. But yeah, I managed to squeak in. Squeak in a couple.
[00:23:25] Speaker C: Cool.
I'm not a great surfer. I'm all right, but I've had the benefit of having literally thousands of waves in Melbourne now. So really I've had about four and a half thousand waves there.
Just a lazy four and a half. I worked it out, actually, when we first had the very first wave was like October 14, 2019 or something. And from there till when the pool had to close for Covid, I reckon I had about 4000 waves and most of those were left hand barrels. But I got the chance to surf with a ton of really amazing surfers, including Taj, who came across with Vance as well a few times. He's old man and just out there surfing with Taj and him giving us a few little pointers and stuff. He's, yeah, you know, when I'm in the barrel, what I do is you've got to get your front foot and point your toes a little more towards the nose because then that allows you to slide your weight forward and back more easily to regulate where you are in the barrel to go. I went, holy shit. Fuck, man. That's such a great advice. So I picked that up and that's been really helpful. But I think that sort of, even though it's not the biggest waves in the world, they are quite technical and they will bloody hand your ass to you if you get lipped by it and you hit the bottom.
We get broken boards, noses knocked off and all that sort of stuff.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Have you had many serious physical injuries to surfers there?
[00:24:42] Speaker C: No. Touch wood. It hasn't been too much. I think if you compare the stats between surfing in the ocean versus surfing in a man made environment, it's demonstrably safer. And that's more to two, I think, as well. With it being a relatively controlled environment, you know where the waves are going to be. You got lifeguards everywhere, all that sort of stuff. But people have suffered some injuries there, for sure.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Few broken bones?
[00:25:05] Speaker C: Yeah, broken bones. I think people land on their boards or get fin cuts and stuff like that. Typical things that you'd see.
There's been knees done and things like that.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: So many knees done. Knees are just done in every lineup around the world on daily basis. Aren't they incredible?
[00:25:22] Speaker A: So you did mention from your first wave to when the wave park got Covid and closed down. Tell us about the experience of the first wave that ever came through.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: It was a pretty surreal experience at that point, had been like an eight year journey to try and get a surf park up. And we had this little moment where we were partway through the commissioning phase, which means that we had the wave garden guys on site and they were tuning the wave. And we're sort of running waves all day, every day. Just trying to work out different shapes and things. And we had a moment where I was able to invite family, friends, all the team that'd been responsible for developing it. And there was a ton of pros sort of around at the time for some reason. I don't know why.
In fact, we had. Tyler Wright was just coming back from her illness, and I think it was like the first surf that she'd ever had actually back. She was there at the pool with us. Anyway, so we had a few little speeches on the point there, and I had to then go paddle out. And so I literally had, like, who was it? We had Taj and chalk and Tyler and who else do we have there? We had a bunch of other pros.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: No pressure then.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Pressure making that drop.
[00:26:41] Speaker C: So I paddled out onto the left. Andy's left. You a goofy. Yeah, goofy.
[00:26:45] Speaker E: Okay.
[00:26:45] Speaker C: And the waveguarden guys, wave garden guys, are standing up on the wall. And so I paddled out and I said, like, well, where do I sit?
[00:26:56] Speaker A: You're the boss, mate. You tell us.
[00:26:58] Speaker C: So the spanish guys say, andrew, andrew, you have to sit here. Sit here. And so I paddled into the thing and they said, right now we're going to launch a wave. And here it comes. So I hear the machines start to work and this swell looms behind me and I am so far inside.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:27:14] Speaker C: And the thing just comes up and I turn to try and paddle and it just fucking breaks on my head and obliterates me.
I come up with water streaming out of everywhere. Got all the pros on the shore and wouldn't they? And then I look up at the spanish guys up on the wall and they go, andrew, andrew. No, not there. Here. And they point, like about another 2 meters back up in the pool. 2 meters. And I went, oh, fucking. So I paddled back to that point and they launched another wave. And, yeah, I would have picked that one up, a couple of slashes and kicked out and fucking praised God that the thing actually worked.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: One thing you probably wouldn't know, a lot of people who haven't surfed the wave pool wouldn't know, obviously, is that they've got markers on the walls.
[00:27:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: So different wave settings. There's different markers for where you need to sit. Got like diamonds and squares and whatever it else it is. So even more reason not to fuck it up.
[00:28:11] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Andy managed.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: They didn't have the markers then, did they?
[00:28:15] Speaker C: There was no markers at that point. Didn't I found out a little while later. I can't remember where I found it out. But when Kelly wrote his first wave, remember that beautiful footage that he launched back in?
[00:28:26] Speaker B: How can we forget stealing into Susan's thunder? By doing your first wave.
[00:28:32] Speaker C: My surfing would steal no one's thunder ever.
He apparently fell on his very first wave as well.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: I didn't release it.
[00:28:44] Speaker C: I'm in good company then. So that was good. Yeah. That's cool.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: He's just won the lazy eleven world titles.
So what happened after that? So you got the first wave there. Did everybody just sort of jump into the pool?
[00:28:55] Speaker C: Yeah. So I invited a good mate of mine, Adam le Mon Karts, to jump out with me on the right. So I surfaced on the left, and then he and I shared a wave on the right, and then it was on for the team. So Benny and Rup and Krista Kuiper, who was our facilities manager, all the core team jumped out and started catching waves. And then after that, we let all the pros in the water.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: I know Kuiper. I didn't realize he was involved.
[00:29:21] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Amazing. So, Benny, how was your first wave? How'd you go? Sorry. He hasn't got a microphone.
[00:29:28] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:28] Speaker F: It probably wasn't even as good as Andrew's, to be honest.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: I had to watch Taj to really.
[00:29:32] Speaker F: Kind of understand how the thing worked and where to be. And there's a lot of very. It's a learned know. Once you're on it, it feels very natural, but it kind of comes out very quickly, and you're kind of close to a wall, and it's daunting and you're between a cage. But it was such an incredible experience.
My surfing probably got as good as it was when I was 21. After testing that wave pool through those first few weeks, we were literally trying to break the machine.
[00:29:59] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And it was just like we're kids in a candy store. I just. Listening to Ben, like, I have to apologize to everyone. I went to a 50th last night, so I've got the Barry white voice on. Ben's got beautiful dulcet tones.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: He does. I was just thinking, you don't even have my headphones on.
[00:30:14] Speaker C: You want to hear it?
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Coming through here, mate. He's made for this bloody croaky voice.
[00:30:18] Speaker C: I apologize to everyone. Too many Aussie rock tunes bit and yelled out at that volume last night. Yeah, classic. Yeah. That's been said.
The benefit, particularly if you're sort of slightly older surfers like us, that concentration that you can get of having that repeat surface where you can just wave after wave after wave practice particular maneuvers.
That first period, the first three months before we open, I think I worked out that I had the same amount of waves in that sort of maybe three to six month period that I would normally catch in twelve years.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Yeah, because when you were telling me about that four and a half thousand, I was just thinking the first thing that popped in my head was the amount of times I go out to Yale's main break on a half decent day and I get like three waves in 2 hours because you're just getting washed around and this and that and you just think far out. Four and a half thousand, that's a lot, man. And then you look at the Gold Coast a billy, you wonder why they're all so good. It's pretty obvious because they catch one wave and they get to do 20 turns.
[00:31:21] Speaker D: Do 20 turns and then they get to do a run along the beach. Yeah, they're all fitness.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And whereas our waves over here, you're lucky to get one turn in before you get walloped by something. That's if you make the drop to start with, if it's a good size.
[00:31:37] Speaker D: Ten waves is a good session.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it is, sure.
[00:31:41] Speaker C: And I think you surf the lagoon enough, you realize you actually don't get sore shoulders from surfing a lot. You actually get sore legs.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Yeah, right. That's when you know you're getting some surfing done.
[00:31:51] Speaker C: That's it.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: I've had that once or twice.
[00:31:53] Speaker D: Mexico, got to walk back.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: Well, no, Bill, it's not because that.
[00:31:57] Speaker D: Comes between the other end.
[00:31:58] Speaker C: No, it's because like in that 55 minutes session, you're getting like somewhere between maybe 13 and 15 waves. And the length of ride is maybe 100 ish, 120 meters.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: It's pretty long.
[00:32:09] Speaker C: So you got about 1.5 standing on your board within 55 minutes. And the length of ride at about twelve to maybe 14 or 15 2nd long ride, you're just full, putting full effort into it the whole way and then you have that sort of relax.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: As you get sort of swept back.
[00:32:27] Speaker C: Out the back in the rip that takes you out to the lineup again. You have a minute or two rest and then you do it again. So it's like, that's a busy session.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Imagine going out to Maggie's main billy and getting 15 waves in 55 minutes.
[00:32:41] Speaker D: You can just think of the rip just dragging you backwards. It's like paddling against it all the time. Yeah, I suppose the rip is going the right way. So that's a good thing.
[00:32:50] Speaker C: That's it.
[00:32:52] Speaker D: Circular rip thing that drags you back into the zone.
[00:32:56] Speaker C: That's it. That's it. Right. The kind of the setup, at least for the COVID is such that you've got rights and lefts breaking down the lagoon and the broken white water that sweeps through into the shoreline area kind of comes back around the middle part of the lagoon, and it's a lot deeper there. And so as it gets through there, it sort of slows the velocity of it because of the depth of the water, creates the rip. So, like a beach break, like, if you're down at brownup or something like that, you get a little rip running through the middle and it kind of rips you out the back between the two peaks. It's the same sort of idea within lagoon. Classic. Awesome.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: I'll tell you what, summer's upon us and the cheeky monkey beers are going down beautifully. What do you boys reckon?
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Mate, I'm on the hard ginger beer right now. It's a ripper. Gotta love a bit of ginger beer in summer for those hot afternoons. And they're stiff. They taste real good. You can get 10% off if you go into vass in the industrial area. Tell them barreled surf podcast sent you and you'll get 10% off takeaway sales. Get it in you.
[00:33:57] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Cheeky monkey.
[00:33:58] Speaker C: G'day, everybody.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: It's bugs here and you're listening to barreled surf podcast. I like to drink forester wines. They taste fucking good. They're made on Wildwood Road. It's one of the best places in the world, southwest of western Australia. And if you go online, type in barreled to the coupon in the sales department, you get 25% off. It is a really good deal. Type in barreled and save yourself some hell money. Get some hell wine.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: These days.
[00:34:31] Speaker C: Has he?
[00:34:32] Speaker A: What about you, T Bone?
[00:34:33] Speaker B: T bone's mate, he's in that good a nick. He just doesn't even need to go to the physio. He's an absolute weapon. But for the rest of us down south physio, go see Trev. He's an absolute surfing specialist. He's been doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things in the world of surfing, traveling all around the globe. Because everyone knows you can't froth harder than a Trevor frothens. Brown at down south physio.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: He's on the wazzle, he's on the tools back at Dunsborough. So get down to down south physio. I don't know about you guys, but I've been absolutely stoked with my Sharkeye's wetsuit best in the business.
[00:35:05] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: They're pretty sick. So comfy. And they're bringing out a new range. It's a more affordable range, I believe it's going to be direct to consumer online. It's called the Mungrill range.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: Oh, the Mungrill, yeah.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: Which could be good in summer when you just want to really cover up from the sun a bit and not be too hot. So check out Sharkey's wetsuits. They're killer.
[00:35:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: And, mate, when are you going to break ground, or has it already been broken?
[00:35:29] Speaker C: We've been sort of managing an approvals process with state government over the last. I reckon it's probably two years now that we've been going.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: It feels like it's been longer. There was that one, like, right in the city. Where was that? On the river or something?
[00:35:43] Speaker C: Novel. Yes, we worked on that was, like.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: For a while, five or six years ago.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Residents.
[00:35:47] Speaker C: Yeah. We had a whole bunch of wealthy people that didn't want to really share that part of the world with anyone else. Yes. So, yeah, that was unfortunate, that one. But, yeah, this project, we kind of were awarded the site in 2021. I think it was, like, early 21. And we've just been sort of running for the last two years.
There we go. We've been running through an enviro process just to make sure that we're doing all the right thing and everything's kosher. And we'll come out of that, I think, in the next couple of weeks, and that sort of unlocks us to then start moving forward with construction. So, to answer your question, we've got some money to raise. We've got some interesting people that are supporting the project. But I'm hoping by about third quarter of this year, we should start pushing dirt.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Billy will donate a restored single fin to the cause. I'm sure he's got some good ones.
[00:36:38] Speaker E: Awesome.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: He's only got about 400 in his shed, I think.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Mate, you seem to know a lot of facts and figures. How many jobs do you reckon the construction of it will create? And then how many jobs will it create once it's operational?
[00:36:52] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Well, that's one of the real benefits of these kind of big facilities is that sort of economic contribution it makes. So through construction, I think direct and indirect jobs is about 300. And then in long term operational, we have about including all the f and b and the wellness and the events and the retail store and everything else. There's probably about 90 ish positions throughout the park. And that means and a lot of the roles are kind of casual roles. If you're a lifeguarding or surf coaching or guiding and stuff like that.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: If you're young and fit with blonde hair and a six pack, you can just hang out and be a surf coach and geez, that'd be a horrible occupation over summer in Perth, wouldn't it?
[00:37:34] Speaker A: I think what Azzi is actually asking is where do we fit in?
[00:37:39] Speaker B: We need wigs and we need to hit that f b. Is that the fitness and.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: Oh, that's the food and beverage we've been hitting.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Food and beverage, mate.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: No, I thought it was fitness and something and I was like, so we could get our abs back. But no doubt I accidentally steered towards a food and beverage by natural.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Never getting your abs back, mate.
[00:37:57] Speaker C: Actually it's a funny thing, but some of the staff that we had, I founded Urban surf and ran it and launched Melbourne, but I'm not with them anymore, obviously, but I'm still shareholder in the company. But at Urban surf, some of the best staff in the pool are some of the older blokes and ladies who have deep sort of victorian surf coast experience and they kind of bring that maturity to the pool. And so you do have all the younger kids who are like uni students and staff who love it and tons of energy and all that. But there's a really good mix of older crew there as well. It provides a really nice balance, I think, in the park. Yeah. Sick.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: Well, if you ever need any hands on deck when it comes to competitions up there, mate, Billy Gibson, you've done four and a half thousand waves at the pool. Reckon he's done four and a half thousand comps in his life, whether it be organizing them or judging them or being in them or say, mate, Billy G's on hand to help, aren't you, Billy?
[00:38:54] Speaker C: Excellent, mate. We'll come and call on you. We've got a really good relationship with the surfing Wa boys now as well, so we're going to be doing a lot of good stuff with them through a kind of collaboration agreement with struck. So it's good.
[00:39:06] Speaker F: Hey, Andy, run through with the listeners the type of perfect event you might have under the lights one night in.
[00:39:11] Speaker C: Front of a captured audience.
[00:39:12] Speaker F: What would that might look like?
[00:39:14] Speaker C: Mate, we've been dreaming about this sort of stuff for a long time. Like people might have tuned into the qs 3000 that was in Melbourne last weekend. I think Binzi commentated part of it.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: He's not called Binsy anymore, he's called Strider. He's called after doing in water interviews.
[00:39:30] Speaker B: Did he surface?
[00:39:31] Speaker A: Well, that's what he says. He said, I'm now called Strider.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: So, yes, Strider bins.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: Strider bins.
[00:39:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw him almost get cleaned up on the inside there as he was trying to conduct an interview. But yeah, the wazzle have done an okay job with those comps, but they're a little conservative, I think, in terms of what you can do in these sort of manmade environments. So the fact that you can produce waves under lights is pretty amazing. And the fact that you can just dial waves up and down at your pleasure and you got lefts and rights and different types, it does provide an opportunity to do really interesting comps. And so from an amateur league kind of perspective, we're know people do indoor cricket, know mixed netball or stuff like that. We could do that as teams. So, like, the five of us could all be in one team on a Tuesday night.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Don't put me and Namo and a team together. It's happened before. And Ben, it doesn't work out well for us boys.
[00:40:28] Speaker C: And I saw you got tubed at baby box.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Baby box, mate. It's funny you say that because you listen to the guys from Lip podcast who I'm sure you know well, because.
[00:40:39] Speaker C: They'Ve got a lot to do with.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: That comp and that pool and stuff, and they're always banging on about how their favorite comps in the world these days is that abb board riders battle and how the teams event just gives it this whole unique experience and just gets that froth. So I reckon there's something in teams event. I reckon they should have a teams event at the Olympics as well. They probably just don't have the time to run it all, but be sick to see, like, Australia as a team of three or know go against each. Like, I mean, all the other sports, do they have teams and individual and all the rest of it?
[00:41:09] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: That'd be cool.
[00:41:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Teams events sound like they're fun.
[00:41:12] Speaker C: Teams are great and you don't have to.
All the comps that happen nowadays are all based on gender and age, and that's how you distinguish between the different categories. Whereas for these sorts of teams events in the pool, you could have fathers and daughters or sons provide. You're all at a similar sort of a level, all in the same team, competing with each other against other teams. And you can whip through like five or six rounds within probably an hour, hour and a half, something like that. So it's pretty good.
[00:41:44] Speaker A: You were saying the turnaround time with the heats last week at the pool was just unbelievable because waves when you need them, as you and I both did the twin fin tango with yelling at border. I was last week, and that's a teams event. Teams of two. I would like to shout out Sammy Morrison for carrying me all the way to the semifinals last week.
Yeah, Sammy. Our first hit, I didn't even get a scoring wave, so there you go. Gives you an indication of who the better surfer in our team was on that day.
The team thing just makes sense, doesn't it?
[00:42:19] Speaker D: Yeah, I'd love to see teams in that same thing. Chuck a 20 in there. Chuck a single fin in there. Chuck a thruster in there.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:42:28] Speaker D: And then you got six guys straight up, and you got guys riding from different eras, so you're going to pick people from a different era to ride the boards. The 80s will come up with the, will come up with the single fins, and the young people all just go for the good thrusters.
[00:42:50] Speaker C: Yeah, it makes so much sense. Like, we'll call that the Gibson classic.
[00:42:53] Speaker E: I think.
[00:42:57] Speaker C: We had the very first comp that we ever had in the pool, I think, was just after we did first waves, and we had a ton of good surfers there. Connor O'Leary, we had. Who else do we have there? There was a bunch of cts and Qs pros, and we came up with this idea where we'd just run, like, a skins event, and so we put three or four surfers on the left, three or four surfers on the right. I went down the ATM and pulled out a, came back to the pool and said, right, everyone gets the opportunity. I think it was to surf four waves. And so we ran four waves on each site, and we did, like, three heats of four waves, three sets of four waves, and we had about 60 of us maybe standing on the point just watching. And so it was based on crowd reaction as to who got the best wave in that sort of exchange on both sides. And then we did that sort of three times. So it all got done in about 35 minutes or something. And I think it was, Connor actually dropped in, faded, did a bit of a check to him, smashed one off the top, pulled into the barrel, and then punted a massive 360 air off the end section and landed it, and was the best wave. I think we even had Taj out there or something.
So he won it, like, just based on crowd reaction. So it was mint. So I gave him the thou, but he'd already agreed with chalk Mark Matthews and him and someone else to divvy the money up amongst themselves, depending on who won. Little bastards over the bar. Yeah, that's it. I think Connor took home 500 and he split up the other 250 each with the other guys.
[00:44:30] Speaker F: Andy, what do you reckon an expression session would look like? What's the aerial wave going to be like in Perth? And imagine in front of a captured live audience with the band, you've got a venue there for 5000 people with top quality food and beverage.
What kind of expression session? What's this aerial wave going to be like?
[00:44:47] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's probably at the forefront of where the manmade lagoons are heading, is creating waves that allow for the aerialists to really perform. And I think we've been seeing some good stuff from the AWM guys. That's american wave machines. They've got a couple of pools around the world.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: Is that the Palm Springs one that's just opened?
[00:45:08] Speaker C: No, Palm Springs is a different tech. Again, that pool closed twelve days after it opened, unfortunately, from some mechanical problems.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Still not up and running again?
[00:45:17] Speaker C: No, they're still a little unsure, I think, as to when that's going to reopen. But, yeah, getting the aerial waves going has been a real focus of the wave garden guys. And so I think now they were tuning them with a bunch of really great aerial surfers in Melbourne recently. And they were then providing feedback to waveguarden live from the pool, saying, yeah, that was good, but I want that section to come at me like about a half a second quicker. Right. And so you're just feeding that back over the phone back to waveguard. Waveguard. And changing the setting in Spain. And then literally like within 30 seconds, the next wave is coming out again with that section coming at you. Half a second earlier.
[00:46:02] Speaker F: I was there watching it. It was at midnight. It was a secret session. Watching Reed Hazelwood do these crazy corkscrew. He was projecting himself so far out into the flats that it hurt my knees just even looking at it. But it was spectacular.
[00:46:16] Speaker C: Honestly.
[00:46:16] Speaker F: Some of the most progressive surfing I've ever seen and just so happened to be in a man made kind of pool.
[00:46:21] Speaker C: It was pretty cool. Yeah. So that's really at the forefront, I think that spectacle side of it for people can get that literally. You can stand on the side of the know from been to Melbourne already, but you can almost like high five people as they take off on the takeoff. And you're really close to seeing guys punting these big airs right in front of you. So it's going to open it up. I think for general public to kind of understand that sort of level of surfing that you can do as well.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: One thing I also wanted to ask you about was, I have heard, I think that might have actually been listening lit with James Miles, who's the host of Lipton also. He's marketing events or something over at the wave pool.
[00:46:59] Speaker C: Good old Jimmy.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: G'day, Jimmy.
[00:47:01] Speaker C: Probably.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: I don't think he listens to barrel, but anyway, he was saying you might.
[00:47:05] Speaker C: Be able to learn something.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe. He was saying that the progression in the victorian surfing has been pretty impressive based on the fact that they've got that repetition of waves and just being able to surf wave after wave after wave rather than competing in the ocean. Slightly different scenarios, obviously, with natural waves and man wave waves. But looking forward 2026 onwards, I think it's going to be a really good thing for western australian surfing and the progression of the. Especially the juniors moving forward.
[00:47:37] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think Robbo. Adam Robertson's the CEO at surfing, Vic, and he's a pal and he was kind of a bit sort of negative and sort of a bit holding back when we first met years and years ago and we were trying to get working with surfing Vic, and he is a massive advocate and just completely converted to the benefits of surf parks now, particularly for junior coaching and training. He was saying to me that they bring all of their juniors up from the surf coast a few times a year and they sort of take over the pool for a day. And he reckons that in a few hours in the pool, they get more progression out of their kids than they do for a couple of months in the ocean.
[00:48:23] Speaker D: So it's just that level, isn't it?
It's like anything you said before, you can be repetitious with your turns and nail that turn. And this is the same with the aerial game, is that if you know what the wave is going to do, then you're going to progress into a better maneuver.
[00:48:44] Speaker C: Yeah, that's it.
[00:48:45] Speaker D: As you go along and people try to do these maneuvers, but in the ocean, the next wave comes in, it's not as big or it's just not the same shape. And that trying to copy that maneuver that they just pulled is really hard.
I think for juniors, they've got a learning thing in their head that just goes click. Oh, that's how you do it.
And if you can give them repetition, they'll nail it in ways that we can't even imagine at the moment.
[00:49:17] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. They're just such bunches aren't they? But the interesting thing as well is you've got the coach standing on the wall right next to them and they're observing exactly what's happening and they can give instantaneous feedback to the surfer as they're paddling back out into the. So it's not like the surfers are out there for half an hour, catch half a dozen waves, come in, get some feedback from the coach and then go out again. It's all life like. I remember Robbo was standing on the wall and I was surfing one of these days where there was Taj, me parco, Sally Fitz, Josh Kerr all lined up surfing the left with me and Robert's on the side of the wall going, Andy, Andy, your next one with the bottom turn, don't think this. And he had his hands up showing a small circle. He said, think this. And he moved his hands out to create a big circle. And so I thought, oh, yeah, okay, right, I've got to think about that. And then literally, I had all these bloody pros then watching my next wave to see whether I was actually going to do what Robo said. But that sort of level of feedback that you can get instantaneously as well, I think, is another really key advantage of the pool.
[00:50:23] Speaker F: So, Andy, firsthand, I've seen the quality of surfing in CBD Melbourne go through the roof. There's six to eight year olds standing getting tubes that look like they're in chopes. Now, here's a proposition for you. Will we see the Coburn board Riders Club compete in a serious level of competition with the Margies and yelling up guys in state titles? What do you think? Within three years of opening board riding.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: Club, I think there's already a CBC.
[00:50:50] Speaker D: Isn't that their central break is Kuji, isn't it?
[00:50:55] Speaker C: I'm a member of the Cop Borders club. Shout out to CBC there. But, yeah, I reckon it's really interesting.
Another really interesting story I heard and this might be bit of an urban myth or something, but I was talking to a dude and he said he was chatting to some Qs guys who were up in Indo surfing up in the men's.
Was it Bo?
[00:51:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:18] Speaker C: And he said that there was some lone dude just surfing this big sort of macking left barrel and the dude was pulling in, getting shacked and surfing really well. It was Mackers. Was it Macaroni's? There you go. Half know the story.
But then he was, like, not lining himself up well for the takeoff properly on some of them. And they started talking to these Qs guys. And it turns out that it was the second time he'd ever surfed in the ocean. What? And he'd only started surfing 18 months before at urban.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:51:47] Speaker C: And he was a goofy surfing. Left barrels and stuff. And that's how he'd learnt to barrel ride. He's out at Macaroni's.
[00:51:52] Speaker B: No way.
[00:51:53] Speaker C: Pulling into six foot pits.
[00:51:54] Speaker B: It's the prodigy of Ricky. What was that Guy's name on North Shore? Billy, that famous movie?
[00:52:00] Speaker C: Rick Kane.
[00:52:00] Speaker B: Rick Kane.
[00:52:01] Speaker C: Remember.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: You get drill when the wave breaks here. Don't be there. Something like that.
[00:52:08] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: So that's actually happening.
[00:52:10] Speaker C: It's actually kind of happening. So that was like. I always thought that there might be something that happens.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: There was talk about it, but everyone was unanimous. Like, now it won't work because of, like you say, the lining up, the paddling, the judging of waves coming towards you. That's like the first three years of your surfing life is trying to work that stuff out.
[00:52:29] Speaker C: That's exactly right. And that's like, we're really focused on.
[00:52:32] Speaker B: We're wrong.
[00:52:33] Speaker C: Yeah, well, once people kind of get the basics in the pool, then you want to kick them out because they got to get then into the ocean to learn all that stuff, all that proper surf knowledge in the ocean.
[00:52:42] Speaker D: Yeah, it's all about popularity, for starters, but then it's about improving the popularity. Is going to send the person to the ocean looking for a wave when he can't fit in at the wave park or he's down bellsway and he wants to ride winky or whatever. Winky or something.
[00:53:09] Speaker C: For instance, in the pool, you can probably get by without ever having to duck dive.
[00:53:13] Speaker B: Really?
[00:53:14] Speaker C: Yeah, because your surf waves long kick out and you sort of make your way into the rip to the channel and then come out the back. Yeah. Right. And you don't have to duck dive to get out.
[00:53:22] Speaker D: That's not going to work.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Prove problematic.
[00:53:24] Speaker C: It's not going to work.
[00:53:26] Speaker B: Getting me waves out at mainbreak.
[00:53:28] Speaker C: Absolutely. So as an example sometime, and it takes your lifetime to learn how to duck dive properly, you still kind of keep improving that. And you listen to the Florence brothers talking about what they do and what they've learned. Yeah.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: That famous video of him doing the length of pools and stuff.
[00:53:42] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: I'm not doing that with my big, thick boards, but there's still definitely a technique I'm running on those big boards and every now and then you let your guard down and you get flogged because of it. Just on a ductive?
[00:53:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, like even learning to look underwater so you can see the big clouds of where the turbulence is and make your way through the clear water to get through the wave properly and that sort of stuff. So all that sort of knowledge surfers need to learn. You can't get that, really in a pool environment. You can have people there that can be talking about it and alerting you to, this is the stuff you need to learn. You can't physically learn it in the.
[00:54:17] Speaker D: No, there's. There's things that you can't physically learn even with time. I remember way back in Kansas day, and he'd come out of a tube and he'd pull through the back of a closeout and he'd be paddling just normally and the thing is just closed out on top of him. But he had this little way of pulling through the back of a wave and you'd always aspire to try and drive your nose in far enough and dive at the same time to pull out the back of the wave, but you'd always wind up on your back.
[00:54:56] Speaker B: This is something you couldn't learn, something.
[00:55:00] Speaker D: You don't learn easily. And it is technique. And like you're saying about the Florence brothers, they duck dive and the wave breaks there in front of you.
That's a technique that a lot of people don't get.
They just don't get it. And these guys are just watching every little movement underneath the water and being able to ride that movement out the.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: Back of the wave.
[00:55:27] Speaker D: And that's an art form as much as surfing. It's like an art form.
[00:55:33] Speaker C: We're all pretty much for the same sort of vintage billy. You've got a couple of years on us, but my 15 year old shout to Lockheed, he's really sort of coming on and he's surfing and he's just fascinated by all these how to videos and stuff. And there's so much information, like he was sharing with me the other day about, as you're saying, the wave breaks in front of you and it bounces off the reef and then creates that little vortex. And so if you're actually padling towards it and turn your board sideways to the wave, you can actually hide within that low, high pressure area. See, I've never. And then the wave passes through you and then you don't actually get munched.
[00:56:08] Speaker B: I'm going to try this next surf and I bet you I'll just get my fucking head ripped off.
[00:56:13] Speaker C: But I'm trying it. I'm going to try it.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: Have you ever done that, Billy, in your 70 years of duck diving?
[00:56:19] Speaker D: I'm struggling to turn turtle.
[00:56:23] Speaker C: I tried it out at decent sized lefties. It was like pulling off the ledge out the back there and got kind of caught inside. And I thought, just try that. Like, the wave was literally just exploding just in front of me, turned slightly sideways and duck dived down deep and, yeah, there's kind of like this little spot where it bounces off the reef over the top of you and passes and kind of releases you out the back.
[00:56:47] Speaker B: I did a swell run to Nias years ago, and there was this hawaiian guy there. I don't know who he was, but he was a charger, like a native hawaiian dude. And it was pretty big and pretty heavy. I was struggling a bit and I was exactly that. I was watching him on some of these, I think because I was caught inside and he was caught in, and it was a couple of these waves were landing the lip right in front of him, man. And I was just, like, bailing and getting flogged and dragged, and he was just duck diving and popping out. And I was like, fuck, mate, that guy is an incredible duck diver. And obviously his boards were lighter than mine. I ride pretty big boards and that's a bit of a factor. But even still, it really stuck in my mind that, like, mate, that guy's duck diving stuff that there's no way I was duck diving. Maybe he was doing the sideways turn. Didn't tell me.
[00:57:37] Speaker C: Maybe. Could be it. It's fascinating to me, like, you go all these years surfing and trying to learn, and you're just learning natively just from the experiences that you have or maybe just chatting with mates and whatever, but this is kind of huge world of knowledge out there now. And so being passed around through YouTube videos and all that sort of stuff that all the kids now kind of get the benefit of. I think if you want to really kind of consume a lot of information about how to become a better surfer, you got it there.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: So, mate, you got a lot of knowledge on wave pools, and you're obviously a massive driving force behind this.
Obviously, you're a surfer at heart.
Let's just get a bit of a background as to who you are as a surfer. Get you a bit of street crede. Like, where did you start surfing?
[00:58:24] Speaker C: I feel like a little bit of imposter.
[00:58:27] Speaker B: You're Rick Cain.
[00:58:28] Speaker C: You're actually a little bit Rick Cain. Love Rick Cain. Yeah.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: Legend. He got like a girl at the end, didn't he?
[00:58:34] Speaker C: No, he didn't. Get the girl. Because he went back to art school or something and she stayed behind. Really? Yeah. That was a bit sad.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: That is a bit.
[00:58:41] Speaker A: Anyway, Vince, waves look good today. How, Vince?
[00:58:45] Speaker B: How's that, Jerry?
[00:58:46] Speaker A: Not bad.
[00:58:47] Speaker C: Not bad. No one listens to Turtle.
So I started surfing eleven. I'm 52 now, so I've been surfing 40 od years.
It's been the abiding passion whole life.
Had a few periods when I was living in Europe and stuff, where I wasn't surfing as much or whatever. But it's been the thing that sort of stuck with me through my whole life. Been coming down south. We got a little cabin, grace town, just to the caravan park. We've had that for 15 years. So we get down here as much as we can.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: And you started in Perth?
[00:59:22] Speaker C: Yeah, started surfing in desert Layton and cables and the cot reefs.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: Did the artificial reef have a big bearing on your life choices, mate?
[00:59:34] Speaker C: So here's a little story. The artificial reef was being constructed. The reason it doesn't work? The reason it doesn't work, people.
Well, yeah, because you got a swell shadow from Roddo and Garden island. It's a stupid place to put it. But secondly, they used the wrong tidal data. So actually the top of the reef is too low relative to where it should be. Yeah. Right.
[00:59:53] Speaker B: So they've completely fucked it from tidal data.
[00:59:56] Speaker C: Yeah, tidal data.
But I remember when I was getting.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Was early 80s, though.
[01:00:05] Speaker B: Early 80s, mid 80s work.
[01:00:07] Speaker C: No, you would have served that 95 meters west. Well, honestly, it was like early ninety s that got built 92 ish. And I used to live in kite. And I'd be gone to uni and drive past every single day and check it. And there was a dude there who was documenting construction on a daily basis. Just like filming for government or some agency. Anyway, it got built through the summertime. And then we got this kind of like, blowy kind of day where there's a little bit of swell and there was actually waves starting to break over the reef. And they took away the barge that was laying the rock.
[01:00:41] Speaker B: You better tell me you got the.
[01:00:42] Speaker C: First wave there as well, mate.
Get out of here. I had a board in the car and there was a long border starting to wax up.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: And I was talking to this probably Billy.
[01:00:50] Speaker C: Yeah, probably Billy. And it had this guy documenting. I said, mate, you've been here every day. Has anyone ever surfed this? I said, no one surfed it yet. What? So literally there was a paddle battle between me and the longboarder guy. We got out the back like this. Big pylon sticking out of the fucking reef from where it's been constructed. I turned, went, caught the first wave on my backside. Surfing a ride, mate.
[01:01:13] Speaker B: I salute you.
[01:01:14] Speaker C: Thank you. Cheers. Cheers to you.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: Beers up, boys.
[01:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty impressive.
[01:01:18] Speaker A: Two first waves at two pretty auspicious made locations.
[01:01:24] Speaker C: And then the longboarder guy caught one after me, had a couple and then paddled in and went on my way. Next day in the west australian paper, longboarder interviewed catching the very first wave at the artificial reef.
[01:01:38] Speaker B: Billy.
[01:01:40] Speaker A: And that's why.
[01:01:44] Speaker C: He can be the.
[01:01:45] Speaker A: First person to surf it.
[01:01:46] Speaker B: No.
[01:01:47] Speaker A: Everybody get off. I'm the CEO, I'm going to do.
[01:01:49] Speaker C: This so dark that I contacted the guys at Surfing Life magazine and told them the story and they published a story about it in the next monthly edition of it to kind of correct the record. No way. And so, at least in my family, the artificial reef Ars is referred to as Andrew Ross's wife.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: That's a health.
Oh, there you go. Is that skin in the game or what? That's more than I could literally.
[01:02:19] Speaker C: I hadn't connected the two dots ads until you just said it, like, Manmade Reef wave and then doing manmade waves, the pools, it's a bit of a legacy.
[01:02:27] Speaker B: That's a major connection there.
[01:02:30] Speaker D: Just on that.
There's one coming up in Albany that they sound like they're going to get off the ground.
[01:02:39] Speaker B: Middleton beach.
[01:02:40] Speaker D: Yeah, Middleton beach. And I've always looked at Middleton and thought to myself, God, something just to unstraighten that beach, because it's God's will.
What are your thoughts on those sorts?
[01:02:55] Speaker C: Let's hope they use the right tide data to start with. Maybe they've learned, but, yeah, I reckon that sort of stuff's going to be great. There's been a few examples of it around the world now and I can't think of one example where it's really worked that well. They did it on the south side of the spit there on the Gold coast, just north of seaworld. They put a whole bunch of sandbags in to kind of create a new reef. But the ocean just moves in such mysterious and big and dramatic ways that it kind of works but doesn't. They've tried it in New Zealand as well. Complete failure. They've tried like the artificial reef in Perth didn't really work at all.
[01:03:41] Speaker A: There's bumberry one too. The airwave.
[01:03:42] Speaker C: Yeah. Which I think popped in its first.
[01:03:44] Speaker A: Sort of half an hour.
[01:03:46] Speaker C: Yeah, first half an hour.
I had concerns about that one. Yeah, I think the forces when we're creating waves in the pool. So we got 56 modules, right, and each one of those big pistons, when it moves to one side or the other, it displaces somewhere between three and four tons of water, and it's moving at 8 meters/second and they've got 56 of them doing that. So you got like 100 and 5180 tons of water moving really rapidly. And the forces associated with that, it's really hard to withstand. So you have all these kind of rock style reefs and stuff, but they all kind of move around a bit and the ocean kind of gets at them. So it'd be great, I think. Absolutely, to create new reefs all along the coast, to create new breaks as best you possibly can without endangering sand formations on the beach and get scouring and gouging, and you got to think about the environmental impacts and all that sort of stuff.
[01:04:39] Speaker D: But I'm just wondering if your sort of wave technology from the pools can be sort of applied to some of these artificial reefs that are being built.
[01:04:51] Speaker B: In terms of the bathymetry and stuff.
[01:04:53] Speaker D: Yeah, because there's places that have got swell and Bunbury's ideal, Albany's ideal. There's a few places, even Geraldton, and there's a lot of little places. Malaloo, you wish that you could sort of use something for the swell that is already there and is evident.
[01:05:18] Speaker A: Mallaloo, points, mate.
[01:05:19] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I'd love to make a.
[01:05:21] Speaker D: Nice right hand point somewhere in West Australia.
[01:05:24] Speaker B: I'll back with that for sure.
[01:05:26] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I reckon you're right. So there's so many brilliant people working in this sort of surf park space doing this hydrodynamic modeling, how to create. They're looking at how do you create the swells and therefore, and how it interacts with that bottom profile of bathymetry. So I'm sure that there's learnings there, and the technology is so good now for them to model it.
There's lots of dynamic environments and things to think about, factors think about when you're in the ocean, because you got swell period, and direction and winds and the tidal changes and stuff like that. So it's a little more complicated. But, yeah, I reckon there'd definitely be learnings you could take from it to create man made reefs.
[01:06:08] Speaker A: Unreal. Well, I do know that you do have to head back to the city, Andrew. So we will wrap this one, Andy. So we'll wrap this one up shortly.
Just quickly, you were saying about the event set at the wave park with the night surfing. I think you and I could probably do a back to back DJ set, by the sounds of it.
[01:06:27] Speaker B: Andrews here.
[01:06:28] Speaker A: DJ Namu, mate.
[01:06:29] Speaker C: DJ Namu and DJ Moose.
[01:06:32] Speaker B: Can you put led lights on the bottom or is that just stick on ones on it? Full laser show surf party thing going on?
[01:06:45] Speaker C: It's not a weird question at all. Beno looked into this for a long time for us. They use these big heavy duty lights in the bass strait for big salmon farms to illuminate them underwater. And you need kind of these massive heavy duty lights to withstand all the forces of the water. But, yeah, it's something that we're going to think about. The wave garden guys put a whole bunch of colored lights under the water in their very first lagoon, which was like one of those toad wavefall ones. And they had this guy that films surfing at night in the dark, where guys put lights on their boards or carry flares and stuff like that. He's this cinematographer dude and they got him to film it and they submitted that to the London Film Festival or something and won an award. So people want to look that up. It looks sick.
All these beautiful glowing lights under the wave, illuminating the wave surface and then just people carving over the top of it. So good.
[01:07:44] Speaker B: What's the water temp going to be in the pool in Perth? There's no heating of any kind.
[01:07:49] Speaker C: No heating is a really interesting one. We've got another project in Auckland where we're building a surf park community there.
But what we've done is we've done a deal with a data center developer and so data centers, they store tons of data for Amazon and Google and all that shit, but those servers generate a shit ton of heat and so they got to kind of cool them. So there's a ton of waste heat that comes out of them.
[01:08:13] Speaker B: We're capturing that waste radiator or something. Yeah, capturing the 186 Holden.
[01:08:18] Speaker C: Exactly, mate. We've got a heat exchanger that we'll be incorporating into that build so that we can take all that waste heat, put it through our water treatment plant and heat the lagoon in Auckland. So you'll have these sort of balmy temperature waters in Auckland. Perth, we won't need it.
What you tend to find is everyone.
[01:08:36] Speaker B: Pisses in the pool and just keeps them warm. Is that what you find?
[01:08:39] Speaker C: Little bit of that.
But the pool, even though it's a relatively big water body, it's within a concrete shell in the earth, and you got greater change in temperature on the earth versus the ocean. And so what you'll find in the summertime, the water is warmer than the ocean. In the wintertime it's a little bit colder than the ocean, so it might be 16, 1516 degrees or something in the depths of winter, which is not.
[01:09:04] Speaker A: Too bad because Melbourne gets quite cold, doesn't it?
[01:09:08] Speaker C: Yeah, freezing, mate, it's so cold.
[01:09:10] Speaker B: I've heard it's like four or five. Is that true?
[01:09:13] Speaker C: I think the coldest that's ever been recorded was maybe about eight and a half, nine.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: That's cold.
[01:09:18] Speaker C: Yeah. Which is like. That's booties and gloves and hoods for sure. Although I surfed it.
[01:09:22] Speaker A: Get your ice bath and you're surfing at the same day.
[01:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Charge them double.
[01:09:27] Speaker C: I was there surfing in May last May. Had a four three on booties and gloves, but didn't have a hood and powered around with, oh, this is not too bad. And surfed my first wave, kicked out, fell face forward into the water and it was like I had ice cream headaches in my eyeballs. It was like that blisteringly cold.
But then Kozia is so active and you're moving and you're kind of down behind the walls so that the wind doesn't get you. I think it's a wind that actually makes a big difference. Yeah, it's actually not that bad, to be honest. That was like ten degrees, I think.
[01:09:59] Speaker B: And are you facing it to the southwest? Yeah, predominant offshores.
[01:10:05] Speaker C: That's one of the key things we do like the orientation of the lagoon to predominant prevailing winds.
[01:10:09] Speaker B: Obviously hooking for those that don't know wa probably 70% of the years, easterly in the morning, southeast and then hooking southwest from 10:00 onwards all day, all summer. So surely you'd be thinking southeast for four months.
[01:10:26] Speaker C: Yeah, that's it. So, yeah.
[01:10:27] Speaker B: What way is it facing, exactly?
[01:10:29] Speaker C: So it's facing south southeast. And the reason is because where Coburn is just on the eastern side of the freeway, you're a little out of the coastal wind environment, which is more southwest. And as you move a little further inland, it kind of tends to switch a bit more south, south south east. So that's pretty much the predominant wind direction.
[01:10:49] Speaker B: And it'll handle it easily in the morning.
[01:10:51] Speaker C: A bit handle eastly. The devil wind will be like a nor easterly, which nor east, or maybe a norwesterly, which is a bit more rare up in Perth. Yeah, for sure, but it's not too bad.
Wind affects waves in the ocean as a function of fetch. So it's the distance that if the wind's traveled a long distance at a high speed, it's going to create chops on the face and fuck you up.
[01:11:15] Speaker B: We're generating technical term.
[01:11:16] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And we're generating waves, like from meter Billy away with something about 6ft. So the winds travel 6ft across the water, so it doesn't have time to create big ripples. So even in howling winds, it doesn't really affect it as much as the ocean.
[01:11:33] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:11:33] Speaker A: Yeah, amazing.
Like I said, we are going to wrap this one up shortly. I would like to ask, is there anything else that you'd like to sort of tell the audience that you haven't sort of gone over before we wrap this one up?
[01:11:45] Speaker C: Andy, mate, no, look, just a shout to everyone that supported us. I think on the journey today, we've had a ton of really good crew that have always remained positive and supportive of what we've been trying to do. So, big shout out to them.
I think some people start hearing about us a little more just around the traps. We're out raising money for the project. We've got a couple of interesting products, one called first in, which is an interesting investment.
[01:12:16] Speaker B: No one's gotten you to that, are they?
[01:12:17] Speaker C: No, first in, like, little asterisks. After Andy, I think everyone will start hearing about us. We've got a ton of stuff that's going to come out in the media and just lots of really good partnerships and things we're going to be announcing. One of the big things as well is we're trying to make a really decent connection between down south and Perth. And so there's like, down south vendors and suppliers and stuff like that.
[01:12:43] Speaker B: For sure. Billy knows everyone. Everyone knows Billy. There you go, mate. Just before we wrap it up, a couple of questions just to give our listeners another view into your depth of surfing, to just let them know that you're not another one of these WSL ceos who wants to call it off on ten foot pumping waves. Mate, give us your best wipeout story of all time in the ocean. Well, actually, if it's in the pool, then so be it.
[01:13:09] Speaker C: But, mate, in the ocean.
Jeez, there's been so many.
I remember as a kid, like, I was probably 13 or 14, got to surf Maggie's main break for the first time and it was way too big for my ability at the time. And I was out there shitting myself and caught one somehow scrapped in. So I don't know, it's hard to tell. They always look bigger when you're younger. It might have been four to six foot or something, probably two foot and then kicked out on the inside and then just a monster sept just rolled through and got parmeled by the first one. And then as I popped up, you know how sometimes it creates foam on the top of the surface? You got like six inches of foam sitting there. I was running out of breath, came up and went to breathe and just sucked in all the foam and then just got nailed by the next one as well. And so I got held down again. I thought, oh, fuck, I'm dead.
That's the one that sort of jumps to mind.
I did surf really big bells a few years back and got just wailed on one. It was probably ten foot and just got held down. I was wearing one of this ripkill search watch thing and it records your distances and speed and that sort of stuff. And I remember it was like I had a maximum speed of 45 going along one wave. And then when I got. I got nailed as I came into the bell's bowl, I was just in the wrong spot and it lipped over me and just obliterated me. I got dragged underwater 75 meters, according to watch.
[01:14:44] Speaker B: What was your top speed on your wife?
[01:14:47] Speaker C: Probably faster than that. Sick. But yeah, there's been a few injuries. I remember falling off my board at cable station when I was a youngster and the inside bit is called suicides. And if you go right, it's fine. If you go left, it sort of sucks dry. And there's this evil limestone pock kind of reef and I sort of left wall. I thought, I'll swing back on that. Popped a little sort of little floater, looked down. It was like bare reef below me. Fell on my ass. I was wearing wetty shorts like those old cool billabong ones, like the flames up the sides. I land on my ass and thought my guts were hanging out my ass and I'd perforated my rectum.
[01:15:31] Speaker B: Oh, that is Tommy Carol literally did.
[01:15:33] Speaker C: Tommy Carroll style. Yeah.
[01:15:37] Speaker B: How did that one not spring to mind first?
The other one, you just breathed in.
[01:15:41] Speaker C: A bit of water.
[01:15:41] Speaker B: I've done that like 50 times. I've never perforated my rectum.
[01:15:44] Speaker C: I had to drive to a mate's places around the corner. I had to drive like, sitting on my side on one butt cheek. And I asked him to have a look at it and he said, fuck that, I'm not looking at it at all.
[01:15:53] Speaker A: Just go to hospital, Andy.
[01:15:55] Speaker C: I had to go. And they said, look, we can put a couple of stitches in it or just see how you said no, no, just see how we go. So I whistle as I walk now.
[01:16:04] Speaker B: Anyway.
Yeah, that was a good one. That's what we come in.
[01:16:09] Speaker A: I know you got a second question Azzy.
[01:16:11] Speaker B: Yeah, well let's know. There's plenty more that I'd like to ask you but that was pretty good. And you do get to get back to Perth. So let's finish on a positive note. Best session ever.
[01:16:24] Speaker C: Mate. That's a tough one.
[01:16:26] Speaker A: If you're wondering, that wasn't Andy's ass expelling there perforation.
[01:16:32] Speaker B: I know every time I ask this question there's probably ten, but give us one of those from that pops in your mind that could have made the top ten there because it's hard to settle on.
[01:16:44] Speaker C: The one that most recently pops to mind is we were down at Gracetown for the school holidays in September. Family went back a day early and I knew the swell was going to pick up a little bit and conditions looked good on this kind of Saturday morning. And so family took off and I did one of these things like I'm in my early fifty s now. You don't get really much of a chance to kind of do a proper surf mission. Or at least I don't anymore. And so I got up real early, had like an umbrella, two boards, water, took my camera gear down and just basically camped up at lefties and went and surf for five and a half hours. Had three sessions, had different crew that I know that sort of were paddling in and out and just chatting with them and waves were pumping and it was just so good. Conditions were great and it really re energized me. So like from that period through till Christmas, I don't think I had another surf. But I was just living off that experience. I just had such a good time. So that's a recent epic session I had.
[01:17:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. And for those that don't have kids in the family, they probably won't quite understand the joy and freedom that you experienced just by doing that simple thing. But it's real.
[01:17:55] Speaker C: It's like running naked down the beach basically. It's so good.
[01:17:58] Speaker B: And you're even lucky enough that Billy and Dave Mack were gracious enough to let you have a few.
[01:18:05] Speaker C: Exactly, mate. Exactly. Yeah.
[01:18:08] Speaker A: There you go.
That is Andy Ross's best session.
[01:18:13] Speaker B: He's got skin in the game, he's.
[01:18:14] Speaker A: Legit in the game.
I would like to thank you for popping into the headquarters. We are on the treetops, which is venue two for us these days. And it's been a pleasure having a chat with you, mate. And also Benny McCartney. Sorry, McCarthy should know your name by now. We've known each other for a long time. And also our special guest, Mr. Billy Gibson. Thanks for joining us today, Billy. And yeah, if you do have any questions on the surf park, how do we get in contact?
[01:18:42] Speaker C: Andy, mate, you can send us a note via the website.
We've got a form that's avantour.com. I'll spell that for you. It's a weird name. A-V-E-N-T-U-U-R.
It's info at if you want to send us an email. Delighted to hear any questions, any suggestions. We want to make this the best surf park possible. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be living in Perth the rest of my life, so this has to be the best park in the world. So this is the one I'm going to be surfing the most. So any great ideas people have got, just let us know, yeah?
[01:19:14] Speaker A: Sick. And if you can't get hold of Andy, get in touch with us via Instagram or
[email protected].
[01:19:21] Speaker B: Azzie yeah, I got one last question. Who's getting the first wave? Or is that a foregone conclusion from.
[01:19:26] Speaker C: What we've worked out in this chat already, mate? My little frothy grom locky, he's going to be about 17 by the time that we launch it. So I reckon it's going to be a foot race between us.
Between the two of us.
[01:19:36] Speaker B: There's no chance of like a raffle or anything like that? Or is there health and safety concerns. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Between letting someone in the public one.
[01:19:48] Speaker C: There'S like the first wave and then there's kind of like first waves, if you like. So we've got a bunch of crew that have support us a long time.
I'm hoping maybe I'll take the very first wave. I might get the left, maybe Locke will get the right or something. Sick. But yeah, we're going to be having first wave sessions with over a short period for all a whole bunch of crew. And it is just epic. It is like having this massive fun factory at your fingertips to do whatever the hell you want with is so good.
[01:20:16] Speaker B: I'm pretty keen. I haven't surfed in the pool yet.
[01:20:18] Speaker A: So wait to see this one roll up.
[01:20:21] Speaker B: Oh, man. I'm frothing for sure.
[01:20:23] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us, guys. It's been an absolute pleasure. You've been listening to barrel surf podcast and we will catch you next time on the show.
[01:20:29] Speaker C: Thanks for listening.
[01:20:47] Speaker E: It was such a way out. I'm rainforest importer see the girl and the way the wave?
It occurs to me there's no to you don't grab a girl and grab your damn. Your opinion, your new Ray band I'll be dressed, dreaming of a TPO? Walk in for invoice the girl and the town the way, new way?
Then suddenly it occurs to me? There's no here's?
We'll be cruising through the burger?
And if we wind up leaving back I'll let you drink and drive it for third?
And see the sound?
The girl and the town the way, new way.
