The creation of artificial surfing reefs may offer frustrated board riders new breaks

By SIMON ROBINSON

reg Redgard and his surfing mates took some unusual equipment with them to the beach in February last year. Instead of twin-fins or bodyboards, they arrived with a 30-ton Kobelco SK 200 industrial excavator. When low tide exposed the huge boulders lying just off the beach, the surfers attacked. Within weeks, they had smashed the rocks and reshaped the rubble into a reef. Queensland's Bargara beach was once scorned by board riders as unsurfable. Now, as high tide rolls in over the reef, small but surfable waves result. Says the delighted Redgard: "It blows people away."

Surfing, more than any other sport, demands acquiescence to the elements. But now surfers are seeking to manipulate one of those elements, constructing artificial reefs intended to induce set after set of perfectly curved walls of water. Bargara is a small example; worldwide, plans are underway for much bigger reefs to be built, from Cornwall in England to the California coast. "I'm all for it," says Australian Shane Powell, third in the Coca-Cola/Association of Surfing Professionals World Championship last year. "It will do the sport good to have a few extra surfing spots." Environmental groups have expressed concern at the trend, but Charitha Pattiaratchi, designer of a government-backed artificial reef planned for Western Australia's Cables Beach, is unapologetic: "We're trying to engineer nature."

Engineering a surf break is an exacting business: not just any waves will do. They must be big and steep enough to challenge but not so big as to threaten, and must travel fast enough to propel surfboard and rider but not so fast as to break or "close out" too soon. "You want a nice fast steep wave," says Mark Occhilupo, runner-up in last year's World Championship. Highly sought are "tubey" waves, whose crests curl over to meet their bases, allowing surfers to ride the face of the wave as it breaks over them.

Like fishermen, surfers guard their most prized sites; photographs in surf magazines often omit details of their location. That secrecy is born of the fact that, globally, relatively few places where water meets sand provide for surf-quality waves. A complex interplay of wind, air temperature and sea currents drives a wave from ocean to shore. Once there, this mass of variables needs a final boost--usually provided by a reef--to rise up into a wave worthy of wax and fiberglass. The mystery of why some beaches yield fine surf waves and others don't, says Kerry Black, head of oceanography at the Centre of Excellence in Coastal Oceanography and Marine Geology in Hamilton, New Zealand, lies in the shapes of their reefs: "We've never really known what the sea bed looks like under world-class surfing breaks."

Black and Ph.D. student Shaw Mead have over the past two years mapped 32 of the best surf beaches in the world, in Australia, Bali, Brazil, California, Hawaii, New Zealand and Tahiti. Towing a portable depth sounder, global-positioning-satellite device and computer behind an inflatable kayak, Mead paddled out to the surf zones and electronically traced the contours of the reefs and sea beds. "We measured our exact position and the water depth below to show us what the sea-bed shape looks like," says Black. "By getting lots of numbers over the whole reef you can recreate the symmetry of the sea floor." The data were used to develop 3-D computer models, which revealed many common factors at celebrated surf spots: most had similar combinations of undersea rock formations and reef gradients much steeper than had previously been thought to produce good waves. Says Black: "We can now design and build a very good quality surfing reef."

Soon Australian surfers will be able to put Black's research to the test. Work is scheduled to begin later this year on a Black-designed reef at Queensland's Gold Coast, where a 400-m-long V-shaped wall of sand-filled geotextile bags will be placed about 400 m off Narrow Neck beach. If all goes to theory, says Jamie Hutt, who painstakingly mapped Narrow Neck's sea floor and recorded wave heights, currents, and sediment transfer rates for Black, the result will be "long rides on great waves."

Which, for some, is one reason to reject artificial reefs. "If you create certainty and the perfect wave, you're just going to have more crowding," says New South Wales state M.P. Peter Macdonald, who last year opposed plans for an artificial reef at Sydney's Freshwater beach. Green groups, too, have doubts. "You have to ask, What are you building it on top of? And what's going to be the effect on the coastline?" says Geoffrey Radley, maritime manager for U.K. government advisory group English Nature. "These things usually depend on how much money you spend on them," says Professor Alistair Gilmour from Macquarie University's Graduate School of the Environment. "But even if you spend millions of dollars, you've still got some degree of uncertainty."

With good design, however, artificial reefs may help restore damaged beaches. Apart from boosting surf, the Gold Coast reef is intended to hold in place 1.2 million cu m of erosion-halting sand that the local council plans to add to its northern beaches. At El Segundo in California, the green-minded Surfrider Foundation proposes a 60-m-long reef to replace a popular break wiped out by oil company construction in the 1980s. Says Dave Skelly, the planned reef's engineer: "Most of these reefs will be built as elements of coastal management. Wave creation comes second."

As the popularity of surfing and bodyboarding grows--the number of surfers in the U.S. alone rose from 1.1 million in 1992 to nearly 1.8 million last year--the environment might be better served if more beaches had better surf, says former world champion Pam Burridge, because crowds will be shared more evenly. Two summers ago, she and her husband Mark Rabbidge were driven from Queensland's Kirra beach: "It was just so crowded," says Rabbidge. "I remember surfing that break with one other person in the late '60s." Says Shane Powell: "The problem is that the crowds bring out the aggro factor in everyone."

But what of the romance of natural surfing? Will the sport be devalued by the introduction of standardized waves? "The beauty of a wave is its fickle nature," says 1988 world champion Barton Lynch, who nevertheless concedes that artificial reefs may be necessary to relieve crowded city beaches. Professional surfing judge Craig Clarke sees an upside: "Surfing's probably the most subjective sport in the world to judge. If every wave breaks the same it will make our job a bit easier, but there's still swell direction, wind and tides--and a lot of pro surfing comes down to wave choice."

Besides, says David Weight, a former English veterans surfing champion who has designed three reefs for British beaches, artificial reefs could be tailored to offer a variety of waves, creating a kind of boardriders' amusement park: "You could have a range of reefs at the one spot: beginners', intermediate and expert." The 120-m horseshoe-shaped reef at Cables Beach, due to begin construction later this year, will, says designer Pattiaratchi, break to left and right, catering for "naturals" (surfers who stand with their left foot forward) and "goofy footers" (right foot forward).

Such manipulation of the sea's ways may seem Moses-like, but the incentive for surfers is simple. Greg Redgard, whose homemade reef cost just $A10,000, used to drive two or three hours to find good waves. Now "they're in my own backyard." Says Perth board rider John Balgarnie: "There are football fields, cricket grounds, basketball courts ..we'd like a facility for surfers." Facilities instead of beaches? It might be the wave of the future.