WATCH: Edinburgh's Lost Shore surf resort opens to the public

It’s 8:40am on Monday 11 November, and Ian Williams, joint chief operating officer at Edinburgh’s Lost Shore surf resort, is standing proudly beside the thing he’s spent the last four years helping to create: the largest inland surfing facility in Europe.

In less than 20 minutes, Lost Shore’s first paying customers are due to ride their first ever waves here. For now, though, the water in the pool remains completely calm. Williams? ​Not so much.

“I think the team are feeling a whole mixture of things,” he says, “excited, nervous... every single adjective you can think of.”

In the week prior to Lost Shore’s official opening day, the internet has been awash with images of some of Scotland’s top surfers giving behind-closed-doors demonstrations of what’s possible on its perfect, machine-generated waves. Today, though, it’s Joe Public's turn.

Mark Boyd at Lost Shore | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

“At 9am this morning we’ll have our first customers out surfing,” says Williams. “The session we’re going to be running is called a manoeuvres session. The manoeuvres wave sits up really well, it’s quite powerful, and it enables you to turn and do manoeuvres across the face, so you need to be relatively skilled to surf it.”

The pool at Lost Shore is divided into two halves by a central spine. To the left of the spine, the waves are "lefts”, breaking from left to right as you look at them from the shore, while the waves on the other side of the spine are “rights”​, breaking in the opposite direction. In general, goofy-footers – surfers who ride with their right foot forward – will tend to prefer lefts, as it’s easier to see what the wave’s doing ahead of you once you’re up and riding; similarly, regular-footers usually prefer rights.

Lost Shore Surf Resort | Lost Shore Surf Resort

“More people are regular, so more people ​do sign up for the rights,” says Williams, who previously worked at The Wave in Bristol. “But obviously as you progress with your surfing you look for different challenges so yeah, we’ll promote that and try and get [regular-footers] going on the lefts and vice versa.”

At around 8:50am, 20 surfers head down to the water and start to paddle out towards the far end of the pool – half of them off to surf lefts, the other half looking to bag some rights. Each group has an instructor with them to explain how everything works. All of the people in the water have been surfing for years, decades in some cases, but for many this will be their first time surfing an artificial wave​, so a few wave pool-specific pointers will still come in handy.

At 8:55am, ​there’s a low hum from the Wavegarden machine at the far end of the pool. On the goofy side of the spine, a glassy lump of water rears up, bounces off the sidewall and then starts peeling with almost cartoonish precision from ​left to ​r​ight, a surfer already streaking across it; over on the right hand side of the spine, meanwhile, the same scenario is playing out, only in reverse.

Who caught the​ first waves of Day One? ​Hard to say – and that’s very much on purpose. A lot of thought has gone into the design of Lost Shore to ensure that spectators are kept a reasonable distance away from the surfers. Yes, you can see enough of the surfing to be able to enjoy it, but unless you know someone’s style very well, it’s tricky to tell who’s who.

Some wave pools elsewhere in the world have been said to suffer from the “goldfish bowl effect”, where surfers feel too much in the spotlight. However, as ​Lost Shore’s social and health innovation lead​ Jamie Marshall explained in a recent interview in The Scotsman: “everything about the physical design of the pool ​[at Lost Shore] has been informed by psychology considerations. For example​:​ where do we want [surfers] to be able to lose themselves in the experience without people leering over them with their cellphones?”

Day One at Lost Shore surf resort, Edinburgh: happy customers | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

When the first two groups of surfers emerge from the pool at ​the end of the 9am session, everyone is grinning from ear-to-ear, and the​ feedback is universally positive.

​Finn Hayward, who usually surfs in North Wales, describes the wave as “so much fun, so rippable”; according to Oscar from Hong Kong “the waves were firing”; Fenton Daly from San Diego calls it “super fun, a really good time”; friends Robert and Stefan, who travelled over from Norway to surf Lost Shore, describe it as “a very good quality wave” and “epic” respectively.

Also in the water for the 9am session: three-time Scottish national champion Mark Boyd. “It was amazing,” he grins. “The settings they’re using for manoeuvres are really fun and really good for practicing performance surfing. Half way through the session they went from the M4 fast setting, I think, to the T1, so there was a little bit of a jump [in the size of the waves] and a change in the wave shape, but both settings are really fun.”

As I’m leaving, I run into Lost Shore founder Andy Hadden, who first dreamed up the idea for the wave pool more than a decade ago. “I was speaking to one of the guys who designed the Wavegarden technology the other day,” he says, “and he told me ‘Andy, these machines don’t make waves, they make smiles.’” That may sound cheesy, but – based on the evidence of Lost Shore’s opening day – it’s also accurate. 

For more about Lost Shore, visit www.lostshore.com