The perfect head-high wave just kept on rolling, forming a tube through which the 11-times world champion surfer Kelly Slater rode towards the camera for fully 17 seconds.
Yet this was not Hawaii or Bondi beach but a pool lined with eucalyptus trees on a patch of old farmland deep inland. Moments before the artificial waves began to unfurl, a duck had swum past on the calm, tobacco-brown water.
Within a week of Slater posting a video online of him surfing on the pool — created by the Kelly Slater Wave Company — it had been viewed nine million times. His feat has gone on to divide the global surf community between those who welcome the prospect of reliable, world-class waves in huge pools far from the ocean and purists who see them as a travesty that will sap the sport of its soul.
“This changes fundamental things about how we feel about surfing,” Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, told The Los Angeles Times.
Steve Hawk, editor of Surfer magazine, said: “That wave is exactly the fantasy wave I drew on the margins of my notebooks when I was in high school.” He added, however, that the danger and unpredictability essential to the mystique of surfing were missing.
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“The thing that makes surfing so exciting, that makes it sink into your marrow, is that there are these fleeting moments of perfection in all this chaos . . . [and a surfer has to learn to] hunt them down,” he said.
The sort of giant wave pools that Slater has spent ten years devising, and which rivals in Spain, Germany and Australia are racing to develop, could breed a new generation of champion surfers who have never encountered the thrill of finding a great wave — or the terror of nearly drowning.
“We might have an Olympic champion surfer who has never duck-dived under a wave, never jumped off a jetty, never put on a leash, never been scared out of their wits,” Mr Hawk said.
When Slater released his video in December he said little about his “secret spot” other than that it was “110 miles from the coast”. Surfing journalists and web sleuths, knowing that his company warehouse was in Los Angeles, homed in on a former water-skiing pond near the town of Lemoore. It sits on a back road to Fresno, the largest inland city in California. Numerous surfers who made pilgrimages to the site were turned away at a locked gate.
Slater’s pool has set a new benchmark but nobody knows yet whether it is commercially viable. It is unclear how many waves an hour it can produce, how much energy the solar-powered facility consumes and when, or if, it will open to the public.
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Entrepreneurs have long dreamt of exporting surfing beyond its natural, ocean limits. The most acclaimed public surf park to date is Surf Snowdonia, at Dolgarrog in the Conwy Valley, north Wales, which opened last July but which has been plagued by technical problems and closures.
Thomas Lochtefeld, a San Diego-based businessman, is working on a plan for a 650ft wave pool in Bristol. He said that the purists could ignore it if they liked. “Hey, go surf in the ocean.”