Surf’s up ... in Lemoore?

Surf Cities USA: Santa Cruz, Huntington Beach … Lemoore?

Even though Lemoore sits more than 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean, the surfing industry has fixated on the central San Joaquin Valley city since Friday when the Kelly Slater Wave Company released a video of the 11-time world champion riding what he called “the best man-made wave ever” in what appears to be an artificial lake. The video has already been watched more than 4 million times on Facebook.

While the video doesn’t disclose the wave’s location, several surfing media outlets using Google Maps have identified the site as a former water ski lake located outside Lemoore near Phoenix Sunrise Golf Course.

Slater’s wave, about 7 feet tall with a perfect barrel, is a potential game-changer for surfing and the surfing industry. If waves can be manufactured artificially, anyone anywhere could experience the thrill of riding one.

On social media, Slater pledged to release more details about the wave “in the coming weeks and months.”

“For nearly ten years, my team and I have been working on creating the first truly world-class, high-performance, human-made waves,” Slater wrote on Instagram. “This is something I dreamt about as a kid. Through rigorous science and technology, we’ve been able to design and build what some said was impossible, and many very understandably never thought would actually happen.”

Check back this week for more on the development.

This story was originally published December 21, 2015 at 7:21 PM with the headline "Surf’s up ... in Lemoore?."