Florida’s Getting A Kelly Slater Wave Ranch!

Well it’s almost set in stone: Florida are getting a Kelly Slater Wave Ranch! The building permission was granted yesterday by Palm beach county.

Wave pools have been the talk of the town recently, with WSL purchasing Kelly’s ranch in Lemoore in 2016, and the success of the first ever test event at the ranch only a few weeks ago, and now the King’s had his first permit granted to pop one out in his old stomping ground.

Slater revealed the news yesterday in an Instagram post where he said:

“Well…its official…we have a building permit in Palm Beach County for #SurfRanchFlorida. I’m beyond proud and stoked to see the first of our developments at @kswaveco going to my home state of #Florida. Thank you to Mayor Burdick and the city commissioners for your approval and support of the project. Also thank you to #JupiterFarms for your comments and support. Looking forward to being neighbours. I keep joking about it but it might be true that now I can move back home now and surf as much as I want! Cannot wait to see a bunch more stoked people riding waves. This is gonna be fun

The new Surf Ranch will be built about 100 miles from Slater’s hometown in Cocoa beach. Kelly’s Ranch in Lemoore was only open for private use, and the lucky few Slater has invited to try it out. However, it looks like the layman may soon have a chance to experience Slater’s perfect wave. The project’s representatives told Sunsenetial that the park will be home to a surf school and will host world surfing competitions that would draw an estimated 83,000 guests annually. However there hasn’t yet been confirmation whether it will be open for surfers to use daily. There have indeed been some suggestions that it would be extremely difficult to make Slater’s pool profitable as a facility open to the public, because of the time required for the pool to settle between each wave.

“It’s perfect. It’s that wave that we dream about, the one that we draw on the paper,”

Wave pools have great potential as training facilities, and with the Olympics on everyone’s mind more countries want to get in on the action.  Many pro surfers have also given Slater’s surf ranch praise in the past: “It’s perfect. It’s that wave that we dream about, the one that we draw on the paper,” Filipe Toledo told WSL at the test event. “Being able to surf it, fitting in the barrel for 20 seconds and make it out and turns, turns, and then a final manoeuvre. Just, mind blown.”

Slater revealed his original wave pool to the world in 2015 and since then they’ve been making adjustments and improvements to make it even better.

The wave pool arms race rages on.