As we spoke with Kelly for SURFING‘s Competition Issue , the main topic of interest was his current business venture: a new wave pool technology he’s been developing for the last five years. Yes. See the magazine for the details, but here’s a bit of what Kelly had to say on the subject.

Kelly Slater:

On why wave pools add up

“I’ve talked about this before, but think about taking two weeks of your life to travel to the Mentawais. To get there takes almost two days — I think my last trip there, door to door, was 39 hours. That’s to get to Kandui and get in the water.

So that’s four days of your life traveling to get somewhere, and you’re there for maybe 10 days. And if you surf a lot you’ll surf for five hours a day. Any one hour you’re in the water, you’re probably going to catch six or seven waves an hour — a good guy might catch 12 or 15 waves an hour, max — and those waves are going to last 10 seconds each. So for any hour in the water you’ll surf for a minute, meaning five minutes of surfing a day, or 50 minutes of surfing. In two weeks. It took you two weeks of your life to surf 50 minutes.

Keep Reading A Conversation With Kelly Slater: Part 3 on SurfingMagazine.com