Every PerfectSwell Surf Park

8 installations across 4 countries, 6 open and 4 bookable by the public. Counts and prices come straight from our park records, so this list changes as the parks do.

How PerfectSwell compares to every other wave system →What a PerfectSwell build costs →

WAVE HEIGHT

3 to 8ft (up to 2.4m) depending on setting

WAVES PER HOUR

Roughly 100 to 320, depending on configuration and how many surfers are in the water

TYPICAL BUILD COST

American Wave Machines does not publish pricing. Installations range too widely, from a 2-acre pool at Waco Surf to 220-meter pools in Brazil, for one figure to be meaningful.

HOW IT WORKS

PerfectSwell is a pneumatic system, but instead of firing one repeatable wave shape it runs a phased-array control system that fires chambers in overlapping patterns, so the waves combine and interfere the way real ocean swell does. That is why a single session can produce a punchy air section on one wave and a longer wall on the next rather than an identical repeat. The reflecting wave generator behind that variability is the mechanism the company holds patents on.

BACKGROUND

PerfectSwell is built by American Wave Machines, founded around 2000 by California surfer and engineer Bruce McFarland, who built his first scale model in the backyard of his Solana Beach, California home. AWM introduced its first hydrofoil standing-wave system, SurfStream, in 2004, and launched PerfectSwell in 2018 after roughly twenty years of development and more than 50 patents. McFarland remains the company's CEO.