Another failed artificial wave project

I can see the Mount reef from my front yard, and I can honestly say it is a complete waste of over a million bucks worth of our communities money. But as well as hoaxing local councils into spending money on more and more artificial reefs when they have yet to actually complete on that works, the crew over at ASR also are working on wave pools. They have the contract to produce a massive wave pool or Surf Park™ as they call it, in Florida. This thing has been hyped like crazy over the last few years but I hadn’t heard much about it for a while until I read on the Stab Magazine Website that Ron Jon surf shop who were bankrolling the thing have pulled pin due to poor progress and a totally terrible scale model presented by ASR.

But ASR also have a hand in something even more retarded right here in NZ. Check out this promotional video for the Wave Box which is supposed to be opening in Auckland later this year. They have even got the backing of major corporates like Vodafone, Meridian Energy and XBox and people have been buying lifetime memberships in advance for $1000!

On their Website there is supposed to be a video of the scale model test wave in action, but strangely enough it is missing. But a scale model test wave doesn’t mean shit really, apparently the test model they had for the Mount Reef looked insane and look where that got us! I even found a vid on youtube of some dude called Fred that rigged up his own ghetto scale model test wave in his backyard and this thing looks epic! Check out the way he powers the wave maker.

The worst thing about all this is the fact that there has already been a decent wave pool produced in Japan called the Ocean Dome, which ASR had nothing to do with. Unfortunately even though they were often packing 6000 Japanese swimmers into the dome at a time they closed it down over a year ago as it wasn’t turning a profit. Luckily ASL Magazine to a bunch of Australia’s best junior surfers on a trip there just before it shut down and documented what may well be the only ever working wave-pool ever produced. Check out the footage below, the place looks amazing!