Will Bournemouth Surf Reef Ever Produce Waves?
With knock back after knock back, the possibility of Bournemouth’s state of the art man-made reef actually giving us any surf is looking as uncertain as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sexuality.
The project has seen delays in almost all stages of its construction, from problems with financing to issues over contractors. The resulting loss of faith from local business, surfers, and the community in general has caused speculation over whether the reef with come to completion at all.
Despite further delays leading up to Christmas, when bad weather and poor light led to the New Zealand-based contractors packing their bags and heading home, organisers in Bournemouth remain positive. One spokesperson stated “In many ways, it’s been a very successful year with great progress having been made on the surf reef project.”
It is true that the base layer is now complete. However, we will have to wait until spring before Dr Kerry Black (designer of the Boscombe surf reef) returns to oversee the remaining work, including the deployment of a hectares worth of geotextile bags that will make up the wave-boosting top layer. Dr Black is also the Director of an Australian research institute and a top research scientist with the esteemed National Institute of Water and Atmosphere in New Zealand…which makes us think he really should have known what our winter working conditions would be like.
We have been promised by Black and his team that the new reef will produce grade 5 waves on a good day. This should attract many more visitors to the local area and is predicted to be a great boost for tourism and local businesses. For the time being however, everyone waits with bated breath for that first glorious swell on the horizon to come
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 6: 36 pm and is filed under Surfing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
there is no choice but to be optimistic as the effort and cost has been enormous.
Everyone should be further encouraged as the order of construction has been altered from the picture shown above for reasons that can only be assumed to be positive ones for the final completed reef.
it seems improvements in the design and construction sequence were made just prior to construction starting and the order of the bags has been reversed.
The bags shown on the top had actually been built as the lower layer base bags last year.
With such qualified advice governing the process one can only assume that it was for the best to do so.
This year what was meant to be last years base construction is being built as the top layer construction.
The benefits of this must obviously be so significent to change so fast that it is now even more to look forward to ..
for those that chose to be negative … there are already many people surfing on what was previously unsurfable and that can only get better.
The reef is all well and good, but what about the offshore winds that you need for your grade 5 wave? having lived in Bournemouth I know that the wind blows on shore for most of the year, thus not making for good waves.
Looks like the answer could be no – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8688693.stm