Back in 1985, professional surfing descended on an unlikely place to run a contest: Allentown, Pennsylvania. The town’s theme park, Dorney Park, boasted a wave pool then that by all accounts produced very mediocre surf. But, the Inland Surfing Championships that were held there in ’85 represented the first time competitive surfing was put into a pool about a hundred miles from the nearest ocean – something that’s an annual occurrence at this point with the WSL’s Surf Ranch. Tom Carroll won that event back then and recently found himself at Wavegarden’s research and development facility in the hills of the Spanish Basque Country to observe how far artificial wave tech has come.
“It’s hard to get that through my head. That you can actually have a wave here amongst this beautiful scenery,” he said.
According to TC, the pointbreak wave that Wavegarden’s Cove tech is able to produce reminds him of home.
“It actually reminds me of a really, really good version of my home break where I learned how to surf,” he continued. “But this is like a perfect version of it.”
Joined by Aritz Aranburu, TC makes the most of this little Spanish vacay.
