All better now.
Technical difficulties and breakdowns were bound to happen at the world’s first commercial Wavegarden facility. So nobody should have been surprised when Surf Snowdonia treaded through its first closure due to an un named mechanical fault on August 19th. Engineers were called in from Wavegarden directly to fix the “wheels driving the wavefoil” after draining the main lagoon’s 33,000 cubic meters of rainwater. That process alone takes a full 24 hours to drain the lagoon, then another 24 hours to refill, so the 10 day closure for something that cranks out man made waves actually sounds like a grueling ordeal. And think about the horrifying realities of any other amusement park with mechanical difficulties. When a ride breaks at Disneyland there’s a significant chance of somebody losing a limb. When the wavefoil at Surf Snowdonia stops working it just stops pumping out waves and everybody in the park gets to experience the universal surfer’s reality known as a flat spell. To the average surfer, looking at a body of water that doesn’t produce waves for ten days is pretty much par for the course.
“Now we just want to crack on with the job of pumping out our waves, and look forward to welcoming our visitors for a brilliant bank holiday weekend,” Andy Ainscough, operations director at Surf Snowdonia said in a press release. The park is set to re open on Saturday, August 29th, and hopefully “pumpng out waves” will finally result in those head high barrels we’ve been promised. In the same press release Snowdonia said engineers made adjustments to the torque and tolerance of the wheels which form part of the drive mechanism of the wave-generating machinery. Now we don’t understand the science of that completely, but we can hope “torque” means more power and “more power” means hollow tube like walls of water that spit things out of one end. Either way it can only be assumed that having Surf Snowdonia’s first mechanical problems pop up early in its existence are preferred over sometime down the line. If it make for bigger and better waves in the future then there’s bound to be some stoked new visitors for the grand re opening. Hell, they just made it through their first flat spell after all.
