Surf’s Down in Munich

0:00Today on State of the World, surfs down in Munich.

0:09You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. This story is a bit of a bummer, brah. Surfers in Germany have lost a popular inland surfing spot. It's a wave that formed in a river in Munich. A few weeks ago, that wave vanished after a city dredging project. Local surfers are not stoked. Now the community is uniting to try to bring the wave back. NPR's Rob Schmitz takes us to Munich. And a warning, there are even more attempts at surfer lingo in this story. At first they were like, dude.

0:50And then they were like, dude. Munich surfers had lost their ride. It's very sad that the wave is not working. Standing by what used to be his wave, surfer Jakob Netzer is bummed. People really are missing it because surfing is a lifestyle. Munich's wave, the Eisbachwelle, is a natural river swell, a five-foot high summit of water along a raging stream that bisects the city's largest park. Netzer calls the wave gnarly, dangerous, and before it disappeared, only the most experienced surfers dared to take it on. The first time I was surfing the wave was when I was 17. I was working in a bar and one of my bar colleagues took me to go on the wave in the middle of the night after our shift.

1:38And why did you think that was a good idea to come out here to the most dangerous river surfing spot and try and do it in the middle of the night? Actually, I didn't think much about it. I don't know. We just did it.

1:57Netzer wiped out and nearly drowned but his throw-all caution to the wind approach is the foundation of surfing but a river wave may not always be there for you and on November 2nd the raucous and rash surfing culture of Munich went from 60 to 0 or from a Dickdale surfing scorcher to a somber sonata from Germany's favorite composer overnight

2:27Last month, city engineers lowered the river and dredged it of any potential danger spots and sediment, says fellow surfer Alexander Neumann. When the engineers reopened the floodgates, the wave was gone. In its place, a foamy, unsurfably lame stretch of whitewater. Neumann says surfer social media groups lit up in horror. Surf is down, dudes. They took a bit too much out, which used to lay on the ground of the wave. And the wave is not farming properly now. That's our problem. Neumann of the Munich River Surfers Association stands at the riverside staring blankly at where the wave used to be.

3:11It's a white water wash now because, as you can see, the water is coming out from the two channels. It's not finding any resistance after because it's going down. And then you have the backwater that's coming. So that's why it's breaking in itself.

3:30Just upstream, a team of engineers and a hydrologist hired from Hamburg tinker with GPS and sonar equipment they're attaching to a boogie board. The city, it appears, is addressing an engineering mishap by throwing more engineers at it. a German solution to a German problem. They did their job too good. Hydrologist Markus Diese teaches down the street at the Technical University of Munich. He suggests the city instead experiment with the flow of the water while replacing some of the sediment to resurrect the wave. He opens a hydrology book to a page on fluid mechanics to explain what's called the Früte number.

4:09I can give you the formula if you like. Dude, no. So velocity divided by square root of gravity constant times the water height. And if, he says, the city adds sediment and increases the velocity of the water, then the Fruta number increases, and the height of the wave should too. All this hydrological engineering talk made Munich surfers impatient, though. A week after the wave vanished, they MacGyvered an underwater ramp and secretly installed it where the wave used to be, and voila, the wave came back.

4:55Yes, it was illegal, and yes, the city was not happy about the stunt, and it was removed. But for a day or two, surfers were again riding the Eisbach Vella, where the surf was back up, dude. Rob Schmitz. NPR News, Munich.

5:17That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.