Maria grew up water skiing in Gambia at age seven. By the time she moved back to Sweden, there was nowhere nearby to ride. So eventually, she built her own.

Episode 6 of Mermaid Mode is the first recorded on location — at Flip & Fun Wake Park in Sweden, currently a building site an hour and a half from Copenhagen, and soon to be Scandinavia's biggest cable park. Maria and her partner Henning have been working towards this for over a decade, including seven years just waiting for permits. Now the diggers are in, the groundwater is high, and the dream is finally taking shape.

The conversation covers everything: how Maria got into wakeboarding, why she co-founded Nordic Wake Girls back in 2014, the case for building a water sports community that feels like a second home, what it actually takes to build a cable park from scratch in Sweden, and why more girls in the sport starts with atmosphere, female staff, and making it genuinely okay to fail. There's also a great thread on the creative process — from Pinterest boards and aquarelle sketches to AI visualisation tools — and a peek at what Flip & Fun will eventually offer: a restaurant, a sauna, cabins, possibly a snowboarding hill, and year-round riding if they can swing it.

One to watch. Literally. 🌊