“Weird Waves” Samples The Palm Springs Surf Club Test Facility

Dylan Graves and crew help R&D the SurfLoch tech in the Palm Desert

“The wave pool conversation can conjure up some pretty polarizing ideas,” says Dylan Graves, in the opening segment of the season finale of his hit web series, Weird Waves. “It’s good, it’s bad, it’s the future, it’s the loss of surfing’s soul. I don’t know where I stand in all of this, but I decided to go in for a closer encounter of the artificial kind.”

For this episode, Graves tests the BSR Surf Resort in Waco, Texas, the Sunway lagoon in Malaysia (a wave originally made famous by Taj Burrow in his “Fair Bits” film back in 2005), and finally the brand new Palm Springs Surf Club, which is what we were really excited to see.

The PSSC, located in the Palm Desert, is still in its testing phase, so what you see here is a far cry from what you’ll see when they open to the public sometime in 2021. Bigger pool. Different shape. Tons more options for waves. The idea behind letting Graves and WW surf the pool now was just to prove the SurfLoch technology works — even in a retrofitted pool without any tweaks to the bathymetry. If it’s this good now, we can’t wait to see it in 12-months time.

Stay tuned for an interview with SurfLoch inventor, Tom Lochtefeld, in the near future.