Apparently there weren’t enough waves at the Bay of Plenty, so they had to make more.  The Kiwi’s Mount Reef project seems to be a success in terms of the quality of waves that it’s creating. "The artificial reef is designed to have a primary purpose of creating high quality surfing waves. A database showing the shape of world-class surfing breaks has been utilised to design the reef with sophisticated computer models…" Better still, ASR Ltd claims that "national and international studies show that multi-purpose reefs bring 20-70 times their full construction cost back to the community through visitor spending."  I think the Mount Reef project  ran about 1,350,000 NZD, but don’t quote me on that – check out what happens when you click their link to where the money has gone.

Time will tell how well the Mount Reef holds up.  If it proves to be sturdy, then I’d imagine we’ll see more reefs like them being installed at some of the world’s more crowded beaches.

Lots of great pictures and videos that document the entire project from start to finish on the Mount Reef website.