STATUS: No longer operating anywhere in the world
WAVES: Long-ish rights and lefts in pointbreak fashion
PAST LOCATIONS: The USA and the UK, plus the original prototype in the Basque Country of Spain
The first of the wave pool commercially made specifically for surfing, came online at Adventure Parc Snowdonia in Wales and NLand, Austin Texas. This is the beast that launched the whole revolution. Developed deep in the Basque Country of Spain, the world woke to the Lagoon in 2010 via low-res YouTube videos. With the prototype an hour drive from Hossegor, Wavegarden’s launch benefited greatly from traveling CT pros who made the small waves look doable. This first design, a plastic-lined pond about the size of your corner 7-Eleven, gave way to a revamped design in a larger pond. This larger model showed us the full potential and included a pier running down the center of the wave pool. The first full-scale Lagoon went up at Surf Snowdonia in 2015. Another one opened in Austin Texas shortly afterward.
The system worked like Kelly’s wave system and the now-defunct China wave pool. A submerged hydrodynamic wave foil (hull) powered by a gearless drive system ran down a central track that split a rectangular lagoon. The hull moved at a speed between 4.5m and 7.5m (14.7ft-24.6ft) per second and pushed out a large wake that broke along either side of a central pier creating a right and a left simultaneously. Speed of the foil determined the size of the wave generated. Once the swell was pushed out it interacted with the shallows of the lagoon bathymetry to form surf-able waves. A right and a left between 2-to- 6-feet high on the face were generated roughly every 90 seconds with rides up to 30 seconds long. Despite commercial viability obstacles including a low waves-per-hour count and the pool requiring a long, straight piece of land, the lagoon started the wave pool revolution we know and love today.
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