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this is about a threatened wave:
Germany´s most famous wave, a standing river wave at the Eisbach in the city of Munich (check this to read more about the wave and its history) is in danger to get destroyed.
The wave gets surfed since about 30 years and for the geman surfing culture (yes, there is a surfing culture in that country!) it is as important as for example Biarritz or Hossegor are important for french surfing.
During all this time it never has been absolutely legal to surf that river wave, but it has been tolerated the past years and even played a role in tourist marketing campaigns of the city of Munich. The reason why it never got really legal to surf there was and is that city officials are unable to judge the risks of surfing that wave. They keep on mixing up accidents in the river that happened several hundreds of meters away from the wave with the fact that the wave gets surfed. To understand the situation you have to know, that the Eisbach is a very cold river with a very strong current and underwater obstacles at different places throughout its path through the city park “Englischer Garten”. You also have to know that in this park there is a famous beer garden not far away from the river. And especially during hot summer days people tend to drink a bit too much of that tasty bavarian beer and for cooling off like to jump into the frigid river. You could easily stand in the river as it is very shallow but the combination of alcohol, averheated bodies and freezing water caused some heart attacks throughout the years.
Actually an australian tourist drowned about 800 meters away from the standing wave, a press campaign started and park officials plan to destroy the standing wave. This wouldn´t change the situation further down the river as the current would be the same, the temperature of the river wouldn´t change and drunk and / or overheated people would still fall into the river. Park authorities argue, that the surfers would give bad examples to tourists and would make people underestimate the dangers of the river. You could close Hossegor for the same reason......
Anyhow, no surfer ever got severely hurt by surfing the wave and it´s just disgusting to see a wave that important to the local surf community beeing destroyed just to please the boulevard media.
So, please help to save that wave and sign the petition list. You never know when your local wave gets into trouble......
thanks a lot to Flo Hagena for the pics!
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