When surfing legend Kelly Slater released the incredible footage of the artificial wave he and the team of wavepool experts from Kelly Slater Wave Co have been working on, the internet predictably went into overdrive.
One of the first questions everyone was asking was where the hell was this perfect peeling wave? The location of the test centre was shrouded in secrecy and the video of Kelly trying it out was deliberately cut so as to leave no visual clues.
Or at least, very few visual clues. One eagle-eyed Australian surf journalist was straight on the case and within a couple of days he reckoned he’d cracked it.
As the Sydney Morning Herald reported today, Craig Brokensha a writer for Swellnet.com, had trawled through images on Google Earth and pinpointed the likely location as a former water-skiing lake near Lemoore, about 50 kilometres south of Fresno in California.
Having tallied the location with the titbits of info that Slater had revealed (the distance from the artificial wave to the sea for example) Brokensha set about digging through the lake’s history and discovered that it had been sold in 2014 (around the time Kelly’s team would’ve been looking for a location) by an estate agent who happened to be a surfer.
The final clue was the side of a shed that appeared in the background of one of the final shots of the video, which Brokensha believes he’s identified on Google Street View.
All of which leaves only one big question. One that only Kelly and co can really answer: How soon will the rest of the world get to ride the wave?
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