Coral Reef Waterworld’s roof has gone! After more than a quarter of a century of service, the roof (based on the interior of a galleon ship, incidentally) was taken off, piece by piece, since October and culminating earlier this month.
But won’t that mean the pool is full of leaves and rainwater, we hear you ask?
Absolutely not! We’ve got a huge scaffolding jungle in the main pool area supporting a platform from which the work inside Coral Reef to take down the roof was done.
This platform is both water tight and wind tight, so the pool is completely protected from the elements.  
The platform is so high up the masts and crow’s nests of the Coralina ship just poke up through it!
The platform itself is quite something - its supported by around 2,500 scaffolding tubes, 1,500 boards to create the working platform and 840 ladder beams all adding up to around 82 tonnes of scaffolding.
Elsewhere, the glazed section of Coconut Grove café roof has also been removed to pave the way for their replacements.

The old flume tower, and its flumes, is now long gone but slowly emerging in its place, phoenix-like, is the larger replacement tower.
The main body of the tower is around 2.5 times larger in diameter than the last one (more room to cope with the extra slides!), the tower itself is 18m tall and will contain 130 tonnes of reinforced steel.
We’ve also had to remove around 1,800 tonnes of clay to build the basement of the tower which is fully four metres into the ground. It has been quite the job!
With the basement now nearly complete, the only way is up!

Our exciting new flumes are being built in the Netherlands, with cross-sections of the flumes being created before being shipped over to be put together on the Coral Reef site.
Overall, the improved Coral Reef will have 500m of flume for our guests.

When the new Coral Reef Waterworld opens in summer 2017, you can be a part of it as we’re looking for new full time, part time and casual staff members in housekeeping, catering, on the reception and as lifeguards.
Full training and new uniform will be provided.  You will be part of a great team working in a fun environment at a well-loved venue.
You can register an interest in working at Coral Reef Waterworld now by emailing coral.reef@bracknell-forest.gov.uk  with your full name, postal & email address and contact telephone number.  Please indicate which position(s) you are interested in.  Recruitment will take place in April 2017.