 Here we study water surface waves in laboratory experiments, so we have made a tractor beam in water to move objects towards us or away at will. We have managed to manipulate floating objects to move towards the wave, to move in the direction of the wave or to keep them stationary in the flange. The applications of this effect could be numerous. For example, collecting the floating objects, manipulating small boats on the surface or maybe collecting the oil spills from the surface. These results on the wave-driven currents suggest new ideas about how rips on the beach can occur in the presence of strong, very steep waves. We now got a new tool, we got a new concept. It's not just the tractor beam that we can generate. We can generate and we can engineer surface flows of practically any shape. And these could be vortices, these could be outward and inward jets. It's a variety of different flow configurations. This work on the tractor beam started shortly after we realized that particle motion on the surface perturbed by waves is by far too complex to handle by any existing theory. Small waves are simple, but large waves are more complex than theory can explain. Waves are commonly used in lectures as simple examples. However, fluid surface waves are way more complex than waves in light and sound.