You never heard about Cunovo before? Neither had we! But after we had discovered a video of people surfing on a nice glassy riverwave, we spontaneously decided to go on a Surftrip to Cunovo to surf on a menmade riverwave.
Cunovo is a small town close to Bratislava in Slovakia. By car it took us almost 5 hours from Munich. The wave is part of a sports areal called “Divoka Voda”. The entrance to the areal is free but if you want to surf their wave it costs 12€ a day. That's actually a really fair price in comparison to other “standing wave facilitites”. The areal offers different sports activities like rafting, squad and paintball. It also has a hotel, bungalows and a campsite close to the lake and the wave. All four of us slept in a camper, the fee was 15€ for the Camper and another 3€/person per night.
After arrival we directly went down to the wave. We had arrived on a Saturday so we expected the spot to be completely crowded but much to our surprise it wasn't. Just some locals and a few guys from Vienna. Vienna is only about 45 min away from Cunovo by car so as anticipated the spot is very popular among surfers in Austria, too. The level of the locals is quite high, they did sick tricks and nice carves. During the week the wave was almost empty, basically it was just the four of us surfing there!
The wave ist not extremely powerful but still steep enough so it was no problem to use our Eisbach surfboards. However, the water is not deep and the walls are quite hard - we found out the hard way. We lost a lot of fins, our surfboard rails got damaged a lot and one of our guys even managed to get his board snapped. We also injured ourselves and as we had not taken a medic-kit with us we had to get creative and use a doggy bag and stickers for first aid. Also beware the current, it's real strong so if you don't pay attention you'll find yourself drifted across the border to Hungary, no kidding. Most of the other surfers had surfboards from the local shaper "Demon Surfboards". These boards are specially designed for the Cunovo wave and have much stronger rails than other surfboards. They also used smaller fins in order to prevent touching the concrete riverbed so much.
As bad as this may sound we still had a lot of fun! And we'll certainly come back but next time we will come better prepared. If you are planning to go there too, you'll find useful tips on riverbreak.com
