The Wave Bristol

Update - Win Unlimited Waves FOR LIFE

To celebrate reaching the £100,000 mark in their crowndfunding, The Wave have announced a very special prize. Anyone who buys, (or has bought) a limited edition T-shirt will be be entered into a competition to win a Golden Ticket!

The reward will include:

• A free membership for life to The Wave Bristol.
• One surfing session every week for the rest of your life.
• Free access to the site.
• VIP invite to all events on site.
• Personal tour around the site prior to launch and opportunity to meet the whole team.
• Any week sessions not used get rolled up and donated to a bursary for kids from challenging backgrounds or life limiting conditions.

You know what to do - head over to The Wave Crowdfunder page and get yourself a t-shirt!

About The Wave - Crowdfunder Launch

The Wave Bristol, will be a man made surfing lake built… just outside of Bristol. Sorry South Gloucestershire, I’m afraid that “Easter Compton - just on from Junction 17” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.

I went along to the crowdfunding launch to find out completely selfishly if I could bag some kind of early bird funding reward to get a season pass.

I was hardly there ten minutes when founder Nick Hounsfield exclaimed that If we create a “middle class surf centre” we've failed. Bugger I thought. But in seriousness, the dedication of the project to wider environmental issues and research is heartening to hear, although the crowdfunding project does sort of rely on that middle class demographic to build funds.

Having worked with the team from Brushboarding for a number of years I know first hand the positive impact that boardsports can have, particularly for young people, so it is great to see that the Wave Project among other initiatives are part of the picture.

The wave has already drawn a huge amount of interest, from Bristol's weekend warriors (those who battle the traffic to drive to the coast each weekend) and plenty of other demographics who should get their own sport and stop crowding the lineup! I’m kidding, of course...

Regardless of whether this funding target is reached the wave lake will be built. At a ‘punchy’ £150,000 target there is still a way to go although there is already a healthy amount pouring in.

How much will it cost for an afternoon of perfect waves? Well, details aren't as clear as some of you will have hoped. With the project still at least a year away from completion I guess the prices for individual sessions haven’t been calculated and may well be influenced by the interest around the funding drive.

But, £100 will get you a 2 hr surfing lesson before The Wave is open to the public, with 1 hour of coaching and a photo gift pack included.

Now, £100 may seem like a fair whack with a snow-dome costing around £40 for the same amount of time. But a session on (in?) The Wave will condense about 8 hours of ‘normal surfing’ time into just 2. If like me, you spend most of your surfing sessions floundering around wasting energy on wave selection and trying not to get hit in the face by everyone else then you can instantly see the benefits.

No longer shall you be mocked as on a Saturday morning with calls of “you should have been here yesterday!”. The consistency of size and form of the waves peeling 400m down the lake will have surfers frothing at the gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

Thinking about sacking in the gym and making your way to The Wave for a dawny? It will cost you £350 for a year membership. This doesn’t include the actual surf sessions themselves but gets you all kinds of booking priorities and discounts. There are also some ace t-shirts and moving to the higher end of the scale a £20,000 all you can eat pass, one of which has already been snapped up.