New Wave-Making Technology Touches Off San Diego’s Wave War

Bruce McFarland has a long-standing relationship with waves. He learned to surf while he was growing up in Manhattan Beach, CA, a classic Los Angeles-area beach community and home of what is believed to be California’s first surfboard shop. He studied mechanical engineering and fluid mechanics at UC Santa Barbara, and after graduation worked for a while studying waves in space at the former TRW, which was dealing with problems caused by fuel sloshing around inside the fuel tanks of orbiting satellites.

These days, McFarland is making waves in more ways than one. His startup company, AWM, for American Wave Machines, installed its first wave machine at a water park last year, and got its first seed-stage funding from San Diego angel investor Marco Thompson five months ago. The company has contracts to build six other projects, and tomorrow evening McFarland will make a presentation about his startup as a case study at the Salk Institute for San Diego’s MIT Enterprise Forum. If only there wasn’t the threat of a legal “wave war” looming on the horizon.

McFarland told me he started making his own waves nine years ago, inspired by a video of “river surfing” on stationary waves that form under certain conditions at the mouth of Hawaii’s Waimea River. He says he realized it should be possible to create his own standing wave by duplicating the runoff conditions of Hawaii’s rainy season—and he realized such a wave machine would be a great attraction for a water park.

McFarland and his wife, Marie, founded AWM in 2000 to develop the idea. They self-funded the company while Bruce experimented with scale models at their home in Solana Beach, CA. McFarland built his first full-scale prototype of the “SurfStream” standing wave surf machine in 2004. AWM’s first commercial SurfStream installation opened at a water park in Taichung City, Taiwan, last May.

(AWM provided a video of its SurfStream machine in Taiwan here.)

That same month, Wave Loch, another San Diego wave machine maker, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against American Wave Machines in San Diego federal court. The suit alleges that McFarland’s SurfStream design infringes on three patents that

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.