These are some photos from the Mobile Wave Tour that came to Vienna 21-23 June 2002. These photos were made in the final in the evening of 23 June. These guys are from all over the world, and believe me, they had lots of fun. The wave is made by designing a surface which is similar to a wave that would break in real life surf, then using four high pressure pumps to pump about 500,000 litres of water over that surface per minute. The surface is relatively soft, but if you fall of, you still get pumelled! The boards have no fins on them and the water is only a few cm deep. The tricks possible are awsome - from simple backwards surfing to jumps, to flips, and one even pulled of a couple of double flips! As it turns out, even body surfing is possible on this thing. After the competition, there was more fun for them to be had. Lots of messing around, beer drinking while surfing the wave, taking the girlfriend in for a piggyback on the boogie board and even on the flowboard itself! No one else could get on the wave while it was in Vienna, but I've heard there's one permanently in Cape Town, so I think I will have to go there some time :) Please Note: These photos are password protcted to stop robots killing my connection and harvesters collecting everything. The Username and Password is MobileWave.
These are the photos from the 35mm camera. 35mm's are great for action shots, if there is enough light around...
These are the pictures I took with my digital camera. It shows that digital cameras aren't yet up to taking good action photos since most of them are blured to some extent, but the quality is still OK.