The waves fired back up at the Surf Lakes R&D facility in Yeppoon with more testing and photo ops. In the most recent round of trials surfers Mark, Jay and Jonah Occhilupo, took to Occy’s Peak. Longboarders Luca Doble and Charlotte Lethbridge surfed the improved beachbreak.

One big takeaway from recent improvements is that the plunger has now reached a stroke height (the distance up and down) of nearly 4.5 metres or 14.7 feet.

“The CWD (Central Wave Device) performed consistently throughout the latest testing,” said Surf Lakes. “Head engineer, Kit Sidwell, was focusing on producing sets of four waves sets, all the while making tuning adjustments to improve height and wave quality.”

Surf Lakes pointed out that since there are eight separate breaks in the lake, a four-wave set produces 32 surfable waves, all within 60 seconds of each other.

But the big internet glory moment belongs to a couple of clips featuring Ben Player and Dingo Morrison at the break known simply as The Island. Engineers at Surf Lakes spent a lot of time tweaking the peak, making it more ‘accessible.’

“It’s an extremely challenging wave and now we’ve got this perfect ramp to get into that section,” said media director Wayne Dart. “The design of the wave has improved so much that it allows people to get into that extreme position.”

Dart added that The Island was best displayed as a bodyboarding wave as few surfers could make it.

Remember Joel Parkinson’s throw down in the original Surf Lakes clip almost two years ago? We put together a quick edit to show the evolution of the Surf Lake Slab