“You need one of those shell pool thingys, sand in one side, water in the other, put salt in the water Mix it all around Put a beach umbrella in the sand And BAM Homemade beach WAIT Put a fan near it And you have your breeeeeze" - RA Fudge-Packer.

 

My friend, my dear innocent and naive friend has suggested that since I live nowhere near the beach, making my own would be a fair substitute, however I am afraid to say that the differences between a homemade beach, and the real beach are far too great to simply ignore due to the lack of 'realism' this homemade beach would have.

 

Firstly I will start with the basics; a shell pool I quote ‘thingy’ filled with sand and water does not at ALL simulate to any standard the true beach experience. For starts the shape and size of the ‘beach’ which most likely will be located in my backyard don’t fulfil the requirements of which a beach is. Have you ever seen a beach a metre at most in length? I certainly haven’t unless you’re a Smurf, and what would a Smurf be doing at a beach in the first place? So clearly a ‘beach’ of this size is not acceptable and would never be able to fairly represent such a stimulus as a beach.

 

More importantly, is the water that this ‘beach’ has, the mention of adding salt into the water will admittedly cause the water to be salty, but can we be sure that the salt to water ratio is correctly adhered to when making the simulation that is the homemade beach? How much research would one have to do in order to firstly find out at the very least the average salt to water ratio and then also administer this correctly to our own miniature model? This however not impossible is very much impractical, and not worth the experience of a very small inadequately created simulation of a beach. This time could be better used researching things like Alzheimer's although, Alzheimer's is most likely the reason you're researching salt to water ratio in the first place. 

 

We can’t forget other important factors to the beach going experience that one hopes to attempt achieving in this avid but short coming attempt to recreate or better still impersonate the actual beach. The behaviour of the wind for starters, how does one hope to replicate this precisely with a desk top fan? Or eccentrically – ceiling fan? It is not possible to simulate wind change, patterns, speed, and temperature accurately to any degree of pragmatism. One would have more chance replicating this by breaking wind themselves. This of course having great effect on the way the supposed ‘waves’ in the ocean will collide with sand of the beach.

 

Which now brings me to my next point, how can one hope to simulate a beach in ones backyard if the ocean beach is not linear to that of my pool ‘thingy’? The tide, the rips, movement of the waves etc, how do you suppose we could make this happen in a homemade pool? Simply impossible, impractical and if possible not worth the money when I can drive 3 hours and arrive at the beach in tight Speedos spending 50 dollars on petrol rather than 100’s of thousands on machinery that will only be used once, after realising this idea of a homemade beach is bogus.

 

 I must also bring to your attention that the temperatures at the beach and in my backyard 300km inland are vastly different. How does one plan on rectifying this to efficiently and effectively experiencing both the intensity of heat from the sun and the cool change that comes from the wind of the coast, from within my backyard surrounded by tall fences and perverse neighbours? It’s just not possible and waiting for the off chance that one day environmental/temperature conditions are that of the coast and by some chance Tony’s wife reverses her Sedan into my back fence and demolished it, and everybody in my neighbourhood suddenly suffers glaucoma simultaneously is next to one in a billion.  

 

Rounding off this argument with one of the most important features to a beach experience is actually that of experiencing it with others. Now can we do that in a 1 metre ‘shell pool thingy’? I think very much not, unless your family consists of 3 midgets and a Barbie doll collection you will not get any form of public beach attendance. Look at it in not just a logical but literal manner. At a beach we have parents watching their nagging little children saying “I want an ice-cream now!” and we have the macho guys attempting to impress the girls who only want them for their due payments, and you have the life guards in their ridiculous outfits posing for Australia’s next top model. Now do tell me how you fit all of that and then yourself into a ‘shell pool thingy’? Just imagine for a second we did correctly and accurately recreate a beach in my backyard how big would the flags we swim between be? You wouldn’t see them, and we'd end up stepping all over the Smurfs already at this homemade beach of ours, so I conclude this pointless topic with the bland yet true statement that; it is impossible and impractical to create a homemade beach.  

 

 

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.