Only in San Diego could they turn the art of surfing into a science lesson and a legal mess over ‘artificial waves.’ No kidding. First up, the ‘Physics of Surfing’ is a 1-unit course for freshmen at UC San Diego.

They surf with a GPS device and an accelerometer taped to their surf boards, and then later sit around hashing out the co-relations between speed, the surfer, wave speeds and stuff like that. The aim of the course is to come up with a scientific technique to catch the perfect wave.

The San Diego beaches are probably the best that Southern California has to offer for surfers, and the key is to know the terrain and the waves. It’s an art, which also needs a lot of hard work and practise, and everybody has their own way of doing it right. But mathematical formulae would be very, very low down on my list of ways to catch the perfect wave.

But it doesn’t end here. The madness has gone way ahead, and two ‘wave makers’ in San Diego are duking it out over a patent infringement lawsuit.

Bruce McFarland is the principal of American Wave Machines, which creates ’stationary’ wave machines for water and theme parks. He’s already installed one of his wavemakers at a water park in Taichung City, Taiwan, and has contracts to build 6 more for other parks.

But another San Diego based wave-machine maker called Wave Loch apparently feels that Bruce McFarland has infringed on their patented techniques for producing waves, and the case is now in San Diego Federal Court.

Next thing you know, they’ll be filing a patent on the scientific formula for catching the perfect wave. I’m telling you…

Posted on May 3rd, 2009 by Thomas
Filed under: san diego