I’m Dr Kerry Black. I’m an oceanographer from New Zealand and I was formerly a professor in a University in New Zealand called Waikato. I started up a company called ASR Limited, which is building the reefs.

Bournemouth was chosen because it’s close to London, it’s an exciting town, it has a redevelopment scheme here and there is a lot of surfing in Bournemouth surprisingly. There are a lot of surf shops in Bournemouth, a lot of interest from the public and I think it will make a wonderful attraction to Bournemouth.

The Boscombe Reef is designed for surfing but we are going to get coastal protection on that reef as well. What happens is the waves break on the reef and then the waves are not strong anymore and they don’t erode the coast so much. So we get coastal protection as a bonus even though we really are wanting this reef primarily as a focus for surfing, so the design is really focused on surfing.

We’re going to see a really big improvement in the surfing conditions. We are hoping that the reef will break in the small days as well. We get a lot of days like this where it is about half a metre or a metre of wave, but what we are doing with the reef  is sculpting the sea bed so that when the waves come in we get a much better quality break than what you presently getting.  Surfers like to have a wave that breaks and then runs across.  You can surf across the face.  To do that you have to break up this very regular form of the beach along here and the reef does that for you.  We have got 70 metres ride on the right hand side, that’s the wave that breaks when you’re looking at the beach from the right to your left hand and then there’s a short little left on the reef as well which is just a little wave there to help people to run in the other direction.

The reef is made out of these gigantic geotextile bags, really big ones, they’re like 1000 tons and they are 2 metres, 3 metres high and 60 metres long so that they are very, very solid and they are all different sizes and it is like piecing together a range of sausages that are all different sizes and you inflate them with sand and once they are all fully inflated it makes the shape that we want to make for the reef. When we are making the reef we have to get very accurate placement of the bags, they need to be really interlocked and a 10 cm accuracy, which is not something you see in coastal constructions.  So what we do is, we tie the reef to this big web of like very heavy duty seat belt material on land and all the bags are tied and aligned and close together  and in exact positions.  We then crane that up, we fold it up with a crane, put it on a barge, and then pull it out onto here onto some anchors that we’ve got on the sea bed, the barge sits above the anchors and the reef is then taken down with the diver through the anchor and the rope come back to a crane and we just literally pull the reef down on the sea bed and stretch it out nice and tight on this web and once we’ve done that it sits flat on the bottom and everything is exactly precise.

What you see on the beach is exactly what is underwater; it is sand and it’s on a slope so we are levelling out the seabed first with some geotextile bags making a real smooth flat surface.  Then on top of that we are putting the individual geotextile bags in rows that then build the sand up to the level to what we want so the reef slopes downwards with different height bags, the whole reef is a line and the waves are coming in from here and we are expecting the best waves to come from around the south west.  They come in at an angle to the reef and the wrap in and break down the line of the reef on this very smooth surface that we’ve got once the bags have been put in place.  There are always some difficulties, the biggest one, the weather.  We’re putting a reef in a location where we want to surf so we’re expecting waves here and the waves cause problems, we need to do some quite detailed predictions of the weather patterns and how many days we will get and then when everything looks good and we think we’ve got a weather window we all rush down, immobilise everything and we try to fill these bags up, get them on to the sea bed and fill them up. So there is a level of uncertainty on the weather so you never know exactly how long it’s going to take because none of us are all that good at predicting the weather. When the wave sees this reef it starts to shoal up and starts to grow up and starts to shoal up and when it gets to the crest of the reef it breaks down a line right down the crest of the reef and we need to orient this reef precisely so that when that wave is breaking, it’s not breaking too fast for surfers.  They can only surf a certain speed and if you make it at the wrong angle the wave closes out, just like its closing out on the bars here at the moment.  So we pulled the reef around and it points out to behind me here at the moment so it faces in the best wave direction.