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 Commonwealth’s 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. He’s 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 crow’s 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 pool’s “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 town’s 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.