Opunake

Opunake surf reef is a failed artificial surf reef on the North Island of New Zealand. It was designed and constructed by Kerry Black and his colleagues at ASR Ltd., the same company behind the Boscombe, Narrowneck and others.

Unfortunately, Opunake surf reef never produced waves.

Design and Construction

Research prior to the design of the reef indicated that there are surfable waves in the Opunake area one out of eight days, on average. The artificial surf reef was designed to increase the frequency of good surfing days by providing one good day out of every three days, on average. With more frequent good surf, Opunake and south Taranaki hoped to draw more visitors and create jobs.

ASR examined the sea floor at Opunake and combined this with data from world-class surf breaks around the world to come up with the design for the reef. The reef was designed to create a right-hand wave on the north side of the cove at Opunake Beach. According to National Geographic, the reef was supposed to produce waves measuring 1.8-2.5m high on the face of the wave. The wave was designed to be ridden for 100m.

The designs were tested in a small scale wave pool at the ASR facility in Raglan to help ensure they would perform as designed.

The artist rendition below shows what locals were hoping to get out of the project.

To create the wave, ASR planned to use geotextile bags filled with sand. The bags would cover an area around 90m long and 20m wide.

To construct the reef, the South Taranaki District Council allocated $1.1 million to the project. Construction started in 2006, and Black believed that it could be completed in two months. But the project was plagued with multiple delays.

In 2009, Stuff.co.nz reported that all 27 geotextile bags were in place, and only “fine tuning” was required. The fine tuning included filling some bags with additional sand and filling in some gaps between the bags. Neil Walker, acting chairman of the Opunake Artificial Surf Reef Trust, told Stuff that the wave was “already breaking on a couple of points”. The amount of money spent had exceeded $1.7m at this point, and the Trust was looking for $400k more to finance the tuning.

Around that same time, just prior to Sealutions LLC buying out ASR, Dr. Mead met with the South Taranaki District Council Mayor and discussed how to complete the reef using rock on top of the geo-containers (as is often used with the mega-containers today), with an estimated cost of $150K.  During negotiations on the majority sale of ASR, Sealutions (Nick Behunin and Chris Jensen) agreed to put $150K aside during the sale to complete Opunake Reef. According to the plan, once complete, the Council would pay back the funds.  Sealutions reneged on its commitment to provide the $150k.

In 2010, Stuff reported that the project was encountering additional delays and difficulties due to changes in the sea floor. Nick Behunin, a managing parter at Sealutions, told Stuff that one part of the reef was working better than two other parts of the reef. “We may have to change the bag layout and how full the bags are,” he said. Unfortunately, the Trust owed a management fee to ASR at this point but it wasn’t clear how much.

In August 2011, the relationship between the council, Trust and ASR degraded further when the Ross Dunlop, Mayor of South Taranaki District Council, criticized the performance of ASR and wrote off a $400,000 loan it gave the Trust. According to the Bournemouth Echo, ASR called the remarks “defamatory” and Chris Jensen (ASR’s marketing director) said “The council’s stance has been that it would not put any more funds into the project for the past three years.” The additional work required at least $133,000 according to ASR.

The Trust took ASR to court in 2011, the council wrote off its debt as “unrecoverable”, and shortly thereafter ASR went into liquidation.

Sources: National Geographic, Stuff.co.nz, Bournemouth Echo