Lost Shore: Edinburgh's £55 million surf resort prepares for launch

As director of logistics at the soon-to-be-open Lost Shore surf resort at Ratho, Chris Bain is the man in charge of delivering Scotland’s first ever machine-made surfing waves. If all goes to plan, in the very near future it should be possible for surfers from all over Scotland and beyond to enjoy perfect surf whenever they like, without having to wait patiently for Mother Nature to deliver just the right combination of wind, tide and swell.

That arguably makes Bain the most important person in Scottish surfing right now: after all, a lot of very excited surfers have been waiting over a decade for this project to come to fruition.

The so-called Cove technology the Lost Shore team are using in their surf lake was developed by a company called Wavegarden, based near San Sebastián in northern Spain. At Lost Shore, it will create around 1,000 waves per hour, breaking both left and right, each one offering rides of 15-20 seconds.

Artist's impression of the £55 million Lost Shore surf resort at Ratho, which is set to open its doors later this year PIC: Courtesy of Lost Shore

Bain explains how, when he travelled Spain on a fact-finding mission, he was sworn to secrecy about the way the process works in no uncertain terms. However, while he can’t go into much detail about the specific ingredients in Wavegarden's secret sauce, he is able to give a general sense of how the new set-up will function.

“You have an engine system that creates a wave through paddles that move through the water,” he says, “that then reacts off the floor of the pool and onto the sidewalls, pushing a wave along the sidewalls.”

As a general rule, waves break when they hit shallow water and back off when they hit deeper water. The concept for the pool at Ratho is for the waves to break hard and fast for the benefit of more experienced surfers when they first come roaring out of the Cove machine, then to dissipate before reforming nearer to shore, providing gentler, more forgiving waves for beginners. One of the keys to the whole Wavegarden construction process, then, is getting the bathymetry – the shape of the lake bed – just right, and Bain and his team have gone the extra mile to ensure that this part of the equation is sound.

“I think what a lot of people have done is build these quite quickly,” he says, referring to earlier surf lakes which have suffered from troublesome leaks, “but we’ve had the benefit of time. It’s a long journey that we’ve been on [the project was first announced a decade ago], but it’s given us time to think about how to do this properly, and in a way that a) is never going to lose water and b) isn’t going to degrade in any way.”

Chris Bain, logistics manager at the Lost Shore surf resort near Edinburgh PIC: Courtesy of Lost Shore

This kind of attention to detail is mirrored in the approach taken by the Wavegarden team, who are spending a full eight weeks at Ratho fine-tuning their equipment before Lost Shore finally opens to the public.

“They’re coming up from Spain to do four weeks of dry commissioning and then four weeks of wet commissioning,” says Bain. “The dry commissioning is just running the software through the system, running the paddles without any water and making sure that’s all fine. When they’re happy, the lagoon gets filled and that’s when they start wet commissioning.”

“Also, get this: there’s a guy called Julen [he prefers not to give his second name] who earns his living by going round different Wavegardens all over the world as their test pilot.

"When you speak to him, though, he says it’s quite frustrating because he has to surf in exactly the same way every time to test the wave. It’s quite structured – he can’t just have fun.”

You’d think maintenance for something as complex as a wave machine would be a nightmare, but whereas earlier wave pools relied on one large moving element to create waves, the Wavegarden generator has a total of 52 paddles or modules, each working independently. If one breaks down, Bain explains, “you pull it out, replace it with a spare and nobody knows. Also, they’ve stress tested one of these modules by running it full-tilt for three months in Spain, and it never broke – and obviously we’d never be running it like that.”

The Cove machine can already serve up a wide variety of wave types, but there’s no danger of it becoming outdated any time soon. The folks at Wavegarden HQ are constantly refining the wave profiles they can offer, and as this technology evolves the pool at Ratho can evolve along with it.

“There are about 20 different types of waves we can create just now,” says Bain. “But if a different type of wave is developed, they can just press a button in Spain and that will be sent to all the Wavegardens around the world, so we can trial that wave in our pool.”

For more on the Lost Shore surf resort, visit www.lostshore.com

To find out how Scotland's new surf resort was built using the latest health science research, click here