Photo: Surf Abu Dhabi
The WSL announced its 2024 Longboard Tour schedule back in February with some mystery baked in. Oddly, the plan for a four-stop tour only shared three locations: the Bioglan Bells Beach Longboard Classic, this month’s Huntington Beach Longboard Classic, and a Surf City El Salvador Longboard Championship event in October. The slot between Huntington and El Sal was essentially left blank with a “specific location and dates to be announced later” notation.
The league has announced now that third stop is going to take place in the Middle East at Surf Abu Dhabi, the soon-to-be world’s largest wave pool located in the Persian Gulf. The bigger splash is that Surf Abu Dhabi will also now be a stop on the 2025 Championship Tour schedule.
“Besides being the biggest and most advanced wave facility in the world and the first of its kind as a saltwater-based wave pool, it caters to all surf levels, from the Learn to Surf to WSL World Tour events,” they wrote Thursday.
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This will be the first time the CT has ventured away from The Surf Ranch for an event held in a wave pool. Unsurprisingly, the venue is powered by Kelly Slater Wave Co., which the WSL purchased back in 2016. The league was vague about its plans for CT-level competition in wave pools when the news was announced but first replaced Lowers with the Surf Ranch on its 2018 schedule. The Freshwater Pro brought the CT back in 2019, then again in 2021 and 2023 as the Surf Ranch Pro. It was slated for a tour date in the canceled 2020 season.
Surf Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open to the public in October of this year, just weeks after it will host the Longboard Tour event. It’s said to cover an impressive 51 million square meters. By contrast, the Surf Ranch reportedly spreads just 700 meters from one end to the other. The sheer size of the venue positions it to hold the world’s “longest ride, biggest barrel, and largest human-made wave pool.”
