World's Longest Waterslide

I Woke Up One Morning And Decided I Wanted To Ride The World’s Longest Waterslide. The Current One Was Too Far Away. So We Built One. Twice.

My charity, Live More Awesome, needed two things at once: money and attention. The charity sector solution to that is a gala dinner with a silent auction and a raffle.

We were not going to do that.

The alternative, arrived at with roughly the same rigour as the lilo, was to build the world’s longest waterslide. On a farm. With no budget.

Version One: A Trench & a Hose

In February 2013, my mate Dan Drupsteen and I dug a 650 metre trench into a hill at Waimauku, lined it with plastic, and turned on the hose at the top.

550 metres of it worked properly. I have always thought that was an honest enough hit rate for two blokes with a digger and no relevant qualifications whatsoever.

Nitro Circus turned up to play on it. The world’s media rang us to ask what the hell we were doing, which was exactly the question we wanted them to ask, because the answer was “to talk about depression” and they had to print that bit too.

Then the day after the event we filled the whole thing back in and gave the farmer his paddock back. Two days of the greatest slide on earth, then dirt. Ironically; it made me really sad.

Version Two: The Record

Eighteen months later we did it properly.

I designed a modular, completely inflatable 600m slide and put the design out to tender. It was won by a Nelson company called Aflex Technology, we crowd-funded roughly $120,000 for it in 4 days and then built it. Twenty sections, each 30m long and 250kg, made from the same PVC as a bouncy castle. Fifteen blowers to keep it up. No trench, no ruined hill, no shovels.

We ran it at Jonkers Farm out at Bethells Beach for a couple of summers and the attention was substantially bigger than the first time. Not New Zealand big. World big.

The video has been watched over 18 million times. The Travel Channel made two documentaries about it, and we ended up on the Today Show in the States explaining ourselves to America.

Then, on 10 July 2015, Guinness measured it at 601.98 metres and made it official.

Live More Awesome holds the Guinness World Record for the Longest Inflatable Water Slide

Why a Charity Built a Waterslide

Because attention is the scarcest resource in mental health, and nobody has ever given it away for a pamphlet.

I had had a new idea – I didn’t want to talk about mental health anymore, I wanted to talk about Mental Fitness. The idea that we all have it, it fluctuates and we need to put small consistent efforts in over time in order to improve it because if we don’t we might just end up in trouble.

Every dollar and every hour that went into that slide bought something a poster campaign cannot buy: millions of people voluntarily paying attention to us while we educated them about Mental Fitness, in a good mood, on a sunny day, on a hill full of laughing strangers.

That is the trick. You do not get people to care about mental health by making them sad about it first.