Leisure
pool set to make big splash in Saanich
Times-Colonist,
Wednesday, November 3, 1993
By Norman Gidney
Forget the Olympic-sized
swimming pool the crowds will head for the wet and wild leisure
pool at the new Saanich Commonwealth Place, say two architects who
helped design the complex.
When it opens to
the public on Nov. 29, recreational swimmers can dunk in the separate
50-metre and 25-metre pools or the deep diving tank where the Commonwealths
best will strut their stuff next summer.
But architects Vic
Davies and Brian Inness predict most people will want to splash
in the free-form leisure pool alongside the traditional rectangular
swimming tanks.
Davies knows from
experience. Hes just back from New Plymouth, New Zealand,
where a leisure pool designed by his firm attracted 9,000 people
in its first two days.
They had to
lock the doors, they were lined up for miles, says the architect,
who started out designing such pools in his native Wales.
In Sannich, a shipwrecked
red, white and blue galleon that dumps water from the crows
nest and cannons on all sides is the centrepiece.
There are also a
rapids channel, wave-maker, four-metre-high waterfall tinted by
changing neon colors, a sloping beach where the waves break, shamrock-shaped
hot tub-cum-conversation pit, separate parent-and-tot wading pool
with umbrella fountain and, curling down from the roof-high diving
tower, a 90-metre teal-green waterslide.
Two owl totems designed
by Roy Vickers and a pair of smiling sea otters will shoot water
on to frolicking swimmers. Sidney designer Gary Sawatzky, brother
of Chemainus muralist Dan Sawatzky, was responsible for the leisure
pools décor package.
Since designing
the first leisure pool in Canada in Maple Ridge in 1981, and B.C.s
first wave pool in Langley five years later, more than two dozen
B.C. and Alberta communities have called on Davies firm to
goose up the traditional rectangular pool.
Reluctant councillors
and municipal officials have been won over to the fun-and-frills
concept by the numbers. Matsqui in the Fraser Valley is getting
93-percent cost recovery from its 2½ year old, Fiji-themed leisure
pool, double the return on its old-style pool.
Gold River built
its leisure pool in 1991 and gets visits equivalent to 1½ times
the towns population coming through every month. People from
Campbell River drive over to use it.
The official opening
of Saanich Commonwealth Place is Nov. 25, with three days of open
house and tours.
Davies advises lining
up early on Nov. 29 for the leisure pool.
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