Adam Fincham is trying to make waves with a food container full of agave and an avocado.

Internal waves, specifically—the kind that exist in stratified fluid. Fincham is standing at a metal chef’s table in the kitchen at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, in toasty Lemoore, California. A chef is in the kitchen preparing salmon grain bowls for the assemblage of pro surfers hanging around outside, but Fincham is intent on his own concoction. He’s pouring water against the curved side of a spoon, directly into the corner of the 7-by-7-inch, Cambro container filled with the syrupy agave. Now, on top of that, he’s creating a lighter layer of water. Just like the ocean.1

Before Adam Fincham, lead engineer at the Kelly Slater Surf Ranch, was exposed to wave tanks in Europe, he thought waves were "the most bullshit thing ever," he says. Ryan Young

He takes what he calls his wave generator—the avocado—and drops it gently into the container. Look from the side, he urges me. I crouch down and stare into the agave. Sure enough, in the layer of thick brown syrup, a tiny wave peels off the side of the container and rolls toward the other end of the container.

“See the wave coming across?” Fincham says to me. “Those are all over the ocean. Back and forth, back and forth.”

Fincham appears to delight in this, but his role at the Surf Ranch—where the inaugural Surf Ranch Pro competition begins tomorrow—is much bigger than kitchen science experiments. Several years ago, Fincham was tasked with creating the perfect wave. Not good, not great, perfect. It’s a word you hear a lot when people talk about the Surf Ranch. And on this particular day in late August, just two weeks before a bunch of professional surfers and 5,000 spectators will descend on the ranch for a nationally televised competition, something isn’t quite right with the perfect wave.

Fincham wasn’t always so obsessed with waves. At one point in his career, the aerospace engineer and self-described turbulence snob thought they were “the most bullshit thing ever. ‘Who does waves? You must be an idiot if you do waves, because you’re not smart enough to do anything else.’ There was my line of thinking. I’m very serious.”

The control tower, an elevated shack on the west side of the Surf Ranch, is where wave operators push buttons and summon waves on demand—like Uber, but for waves. Ryan Young

Fincham, 52, was born in England and raised in Jamaica. He was a tinkerer from an early age. Growing up in the Carribean, he says, meant he often made his own gadgets, from GI Joe accessories to automotive parts, rather than purchasing them. His father, a biochemistry teacher, eventually ended up relocating from Jamaica to Southern California to teach at USC. Fincham followed him there, dropping his physics studies at the University of the West Indies and picking up aerospace engineering at USC in 1985. The department was heavy with fluid dynamics experts; thus began Fincham’s relationship with fluids, or, rather, the movement of fluids.

But even then, he was still more interested in geophysical turbulence than he was in waves. In the field of turbulence, much remains unsolved; Fincham saw this as a type of job security. After earning his PhD in geophysical fluid dynamics in 1994, he took off for France, where he worked at the National Center for Scientific Research.

It was through a program called Hydralab, a network of European research institutions with experimental hydraulic systems, that Fincham says he began to shed his snobbery against waves. He started conducting experiments on the Coriolis, the largest rotating water tank in the world. In Hannover, Germany, he worked on a 1,000-foot-long wave tank, one that generated waves 8 feet high. He conducted research on a wave tank in Barcelona, Spain, and on a wave flume in Delft, Holland.