While Londoners continue to battle the blazing heat amid a two-day heat warning, Canada’s largest swimming pool is gearing up to make a big splash with a new tourist attraction for the summer season.
The St. Marys quarry will soon be home to a floating waterpark, the first of its kind for the London region.
“We looked at various locations in southwestern Ontario and there was clearly a demand for this,” said Patrick Jackson, owner of Super Splash.
Opening June 25, in conjunction with the St. Marys quarry, the Super Splash Waterpark is known as “the ultimate playground,” according to their website.
Jackson and his wife started their business in 2017 after seeing a similar attraction in Kelowna.
“I was just sitting on the beach and thinking, ‘Wow, my kids are having such a great time on this. It’s different, challenging, gets them running and such a well-rounded activity for the summer,’” Jackson said.
The following year, Super Splash opened its first floating waterpark in Hamilton, where Jackson noticed the increasing abundance of out-of-town traffic.
“We were getting traffic as far away as Sarnia, London, Kitchener Stratford,” Jackson said. “We looked at the population base here in St. Marys and quite frankly, this is the only place where we can do something like this in southwestern Ontario,” Jackson said.
“This is ideal for our setup and operation.”
But despite the attraction being inflatable, bringing it to St. Marys was not as easy as it seems.
To keep the waterpark stable in a central location, about 60 concrete blocks, each weighing more than 408 kilograms, needed to be lowered into the quarry to be used as anchors.
“Normally, we would bring in a forklift and move the blocks to deep water and then airbag them to move them around and get them in position so that the inflatables could be attached and keep it tied down,” Jackson said.
“But we weren’t operating in a normal beach setting with the hard limestone rock so what it came down to was bringing in a helicopter.”
On Wednesday, Stratford regional police, local fire crews and other emergency responders were present as the helicopter prepared to lift the blocks into the water.
“On Monday, we actually found out that the blocks were too heavy for the helicopter to carry so we had to cut off about 150 pounds,” Jackson said.
With the anchors in place, the assembling of the waterpark has begun.
According to Jackson, the quarry itself is approximately 70 metres wide and the waterpark measures about 51 meters wide.
“You’ve got about 10 meters on each side so it’s going to take up a fair chunk of real estate in the quarry,” Jackson said.
Gearing up for the upcoming summer season as the quarry is set to reopen after a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, Jackson said that all profits from the waterpark will be shared with the municipality, which will provide staffing, according to a lease.
“It’s going to bring people into the community, and it’s going to be a huge economic benefit to the community, to the town, and to all the surrounding businesses in the area,” he added.
Before entering the waterpark market, Jackson was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“As a veteran, being able to bring an aviation component into something that I’m creating, it just makes me smile year to year knowing what we have accomplished so far,” he said.
For more information on the Super Splash Waterpark visit the Town of St. Marys website.
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