article: Surfing began somewhere in the distant past of Polynesian culture and by the mid eighteenth century, Captain James Cook sailed to Hawaii and saw locals climbing onto wooden boards and speeding along the waves. Eventually, a craze for wave riding spread and now it's thought at least 36 million people worldwide identify themselves as surfers. They all, however, face an inescapable truth: perfect, surfable waves don't always show up where and when they're wanted. "Most of our good surfing waves around the world are adjacent to big expanses of ocean," says Dr Mark Davidson of Plymouth University, an oceanographer with a special interest in waves and surfing. The best surfing waves start life in stormy seas far from shore. Winds whip the surface into peaks which race away from the storm centre and over time transform into swell that rolls along under its own steam. Like fine wines, the best waves take time to mature. These water-borne pulses of energy continue their long journey towards land, sorting themselves out as they go, becoming less choppy and more refined - and bigger. That's why world-class surf rolls to shore in spots like Hawaii, Bali and Portugal. Elsewhere, where there isn't a wide ocean delivering well-matured swell, people are attempting to improve the waves. The aim of artificial surfing reefs is to enhance smaller waves into a surfable break. "There's no magic here, you don't create waves," says Dr Davidson. "The idea is that you can focus waves, a bit like light travelling through a lens," he says. A reef - natural or otherwise - acts as a magnet for swell, concentrating the waves' energy and making a bigger, more powerful break. That's the theory, anyway. One of the newest artificial surfing reefs was installed on England's south coast, at Boscombe close to Bournemouth. Here in the English Channel, where long-distance swell is distinctly lacking, waves are driven by local winds which produce choppier, smaller surf. In a bid to improve the quality and consistency of Boscombe's waves, Bournemouth Borough Council paid Â£3.2 million to install an artificial surf reef. The football pitch-sized reef consists of sand-filled geotextile bags that were designed to raise the seabed and magnify existing waves. But when the reef opened in 2009, it was a crashing disappointment for local surfers. "It didn't produce the right shape of wave," says Mark Davidson. He was brought in to assess the reef's performance, which he did by surfing it with a GPS unit fitted inside his wetsuit. "That allowed me very accurately to evaluate my ride length, the peel angle of the waves and how fast the wave was breaking," he says. Dr Davidson concluded that the reef was no good for surfing. It kicked up steep, dumpy waves that collapsed over his head rather than breaking gradually, peeling from one side to the other. Boscombe's surf reef is not the first to fall short. According to Davidson, of the 12 artificial surf reefs built worldwide, none have worked. "As yet we still don't have a successful example in generating a quality
summary: For centuries, people have been lured in by the thundering power of surf.