Photo: Surf Lakes. A wave at the Yeppoon prototype.
Surf Lakes is selling the central Queensland site where it built and tested its wave pool technology. The company announced the sale on 10 November 2026, and ABC reported that the property is on the market for about A$4 million. The full-scale prototype there was finished in 2018 but never opened to the public, and it has since been left idle and decommissioned.
What is for sale
The site lies halfway between Rockhampton and Yeppoon. Its machine, a giant plunger at the centre of a lake, rises and falls to send waves outward to several breaks at once, and ABC says it could make over 2,000 waves an hour across five wave types. The sale includes the council's 2022 approval for a tourism development, which ABC says covers a tourist park of 150 rooms and 100 caravan sites, plus plans for cabins, restaurants, a learn-to-surf lagoon and a solar farm. Surf Lakes' agents are seeking interest both from surf lake developers and from buyers who would use the land differently.
What Surf Lakes says
In the company's statement, Lewis Glynn, managing director of Surf Lakes Queensland and chief operating officer of Surf Lakes Global, said Yeppoon had been set up as "a research, development and demonstration facility". "Yeppoon enabled Surf Lakes to test its technology at full scale and showcase it to investors, commercial partners and prospective licensees from around the world," he said.
The view from the Capricorn Coast
Capricorn Enterprise chief executive Mary Carroll told ABC the site would be hard to sell because it is rural and was built and placed to be a surf park. For shareholders hoping to see Yeppoon developed, she said, "that is completely off the table." ABC also reported that founder Aaron Trevis, a Capricorn Coast local who chose the site, parted ways with Surf Lakes as it moved its focus away from Queensland to a development in Austin, Texas.
What it means for Peak and the US licences
No Surf Lakes pool has yet run as a public, paying park. The Inertia reports that the company sold seven licences for US pools and that none of those has materialised. In our directory, Peak Surf Park in Pasco County, Florida, is now the only Surf Lakes project still in development. Pasco County commissioners approved the Two Rivers plans that include it on 9 September 2026, and Peak's website still targets late 2027. The sale does not touch Peak's approvals, but it does mean Surf Lakes is letting go of the site where its wave was proven at full scale. Our article on Peak covers what is approved there.
Good to Know
Australia has only two surf parks open to the public, both URBNSURF lagoons, in Melbourne and Sydney. Queensland's projects to watch are now Palm Valley Gold Coast and Surf Farm on the Sunshine Coast.
