Does the price of admission offset our already very inefficient practice of catching waves?
“Nobody should ever have to pay to surf a wave.” That seems to be the leading argument in the charge against the world’s newest toy: surf parks. With the first ever commercial Wavegarden facility opening for business, we have now officially entered a world where paying by the wave is a thing. Well, kind of. The truth is, hunting for waves has been emptying (or at least thinning) your wallet in one way or another for as long as you’ve been a part of the club. We pay for boards, wetsuits, gas, travel costs, board shorts. Even the $1 for a bar of wax is coming out of your pocket. But before you throw your next fit over somebody charging admission to jump on a wave, let’s break down the real cost.
Admission (1 hour): 19 pounds to 45 pounds (US: $29-$70)
Holy crap! $70 to surf for an hour? At face value, it sounds outlandish. But are you really paying for an hour of surfing as you know it? Not so much. In 2011, the Surfrider Foundation published a study on the economics of surfing, in which they surveyed over 5,000 surfers throughout the US from November 2008 to September 2009. They took into account everything from the income of the people surveyed to how living near the ocean impacts standard living expenses (i.e. You’re paying more!).
What’d they find? The average surfer, according to their sample, owns four surfboards at any given time. They drive 20 miles round trip for each surf session, and typically surf around 108 times a year with each session lasting two and a half hours. Accounting for replacing wetsuits every so often, buying a new board here and there, and the costs of traveling those 20 miles 108 times along with other random expenses, Surfrider’s survey found that we’re spending $66 (US) per session. The numbers change from coast to coast, with Californians and Hawaiians surfing the most sessions and traveling the shortest distances. Meanwhile, Gulf surfers are traveling the furthest, surfing the fewest sessions, and by extension, spending the most money on each trip to the beach at $100.
How much does a wave cost?
This is where it gets tricky. There are a lot of random studies out there about how inefficient our sport is. A lot of factors impact how many waves you catch in your two and a half hours in the water, making it hard to narrow down whether you’re getting five or 15 waves a day. But while we can’t break down how many waves you catch, we can observe how often waves are available at your favorite spot. Kind of.
One study, conducted by a San Diego professor, observed how regularly sets came through his home break in Oceanside. With sets coming through sporadically, some sets offering three waves, others offering more, or even the occasional solo sneaker coming through, the final conclusion was that a “set wave” rolled through Oceanside every 8.8 minutes. Sounds a little low, but we’ll go with it since there are certainly a lot of places across the globe that are far more inconsistent. Over two and a half hours that makes just 17.45 waves available to surf. Even if you catch all 17 of those waves, at $66 you’re spending $3.48 a pop.
Wavegarden pools, on the other hand, claim to pump out an 18 second ride once every minute, according to Surf Snowdonia’s website. With your $70 ticket, you’re paying $1.16 a wave, a bargain compared to the two and a half hours spent in Oceanside. Yes, there are other costs that go into that one hour session. You’re still paying to rent a board or bringing the gear that’s factored into Surfrider’s study. Snowdonia offers waterfront surf pods for guests staying at the park, which would be the same as paying to stay in a beach side villa, anyway.
But let’s be honest, one 20 second wave is significantly better than the 5-6 seconds you’re spending on a good beach break set wave. We could start to argue that one wave at Snowdonia is more valuable than multiple waves you chase after in the ocean, purely from the standpoint of time spent on a breaking wave of course. The Inertia Founder Zach Weisberg recently ditched the rest of the crew here in Venice for a trip to Spain’s Surfilm Festibal. On the itinerary was a covert (not really) journey inside the Wavegarden’s original test facility. He surfed it for 45 minutes and came back with stories of being burnt out after little less than an hour in the water. Twenty second rides fry your quads, so it’s reasonable to argue you’re getting more bang for your buck with a single hour in the water at Surf Snowdonia compared to two and a half hours of chasing waves that may or may not come when you’re in the ocean.
Let’s talk cost efficiency.
So what are we “paying” for now that we live in an era of charging admission to surf? I’ll be the first to argue nothing can ever compare to the unknown, the adventure, the balancing act that is paddling into the ocean. But heck, if we’re really going to talk about whether or not it’s ok for somebody to open their wallet in hopes of getting barreled, let’s face the fact that we already do it anyway. We book plane tickets, we buy boards and wetsuits, eat crazy amounts of fast food after a 4 hour session, fill up our gas tanks, pay for lodging, and even slip local fishermen a couple of bucks to ferry us from island to island. We even pay people to plan these trips for us to begin with. So, let’s just close with a little game of would you rather: Would you rather pay $1.16 for a head high, 20 second barrel that’s going to hold you over for an entire winter anyway? Or fork out $3.48 for the status quo? There’s no wrong answer, but there is common sense.
