Making Waves

“We’ve got one in Germany right now where we can dial up a full-on, throbbing pit,” Tom Lochtefeld says in the giddy vernacular of surfers. He’s calling from a business trip to Taiwan, which, like Germany, probably didn’t know it needed an artificial wave until this lanky La Jolla surf rat demoed his precision 8-foot curl, as mesmerizing as the one in the opening credits of “Hawaii Five-O.”

Lochtefeld, an affable lawyer and real estate developer turned hydrodynamics expert, co-founded Raging Waters in San Dimas in 1983. Since patenting his Flowrider stationary wave in 1990, he has installed 23 of the attractions in water parks from Norway to Dubai. The typical Flowrider generates a riding surface about the size of a two-car garage. To vary its height and power, the operator can tinker with the pumps that blast a thin sheet of water over a spongy hump that redirects the flow into a swirling vortex. Picture a chlorinated river rapid sculpted into anything from a weak comber for recreational boogie boarders to, yes, a throbbing pit.

Lochtefeld says he’s closing in on the final permits for a “wave house” in San Diego’s Belmont Park that’s scheduled to open next spring. It will feature eight Flowriders pitching a variety of waves; sessions on the gnarliest will be by invitation only. Surprisingly, the best “flowboys,”

who ride with their feet strapped to soft, finless boards the size of cafeteria trays, tend to be skateboarders and snowboarders rather than surfers.

“When you consider the relationship between the board and the medium, it’s actually more like snowboarding,” Lochtefeld says. “The Flowrider’s water is moving much faster than you’d find in a real wave. A 6-foot wave in the ocean is going about . . . wait, let me get my calculator, just one sec, real quick . . . OK, an ocean wave travels maybe 17 feet a second, whereas a 6-foot sheet wave goes about 27 feet a second.”

Lochtefeld got into the wave-making business during the real estate bust of the early ‘80s, cannily combining his career search for a “cash business” with his love of surfing. “It was a lifestyle choice,” he says. His ideal venture would be to build a pool that serves up breaking waves (propelled, perhaps, by submerged hydraulic wings) just like the salty swells he rides near his home. But “to make a really good wave, one with a nice barrel, you need a steep bottom,” Lochtefeld explains. “And health departments don’t like that.” Also, you’ve got to filter huge amounts of water, making the cost prohibitive.

Which doesn’t mean Lochtefeld, 47, has shelved the dream. He talks about creating the perfect surfing wave, perhaps at the second phase of the San Diego site, where revenue from stores and restaurants would offset the financial drain of a wave pool. So, is the real goal here to engineer a world-class surf spot that he and his friends can have all to themselves after hours? “Exactly,” he says. “That’s it exactly.”