Thursday, May 14, 2009

Friday’s Surf – Smaller but still fun

Friday will be another surf day.

It won’t be great or all that consistent but there will still be a little swell in the water and the winds will continue to stay on the light side.

We are going to have a mix of fading SW swell (180-220) and background WNW-NW energy.

Most spots are going to continue to hold around waist high. The standout SW facing spots, mostly through OC and San Diego, will be in the waist-chest high range with a few inconsistent chest-shoulder high sets. It will be long waits between waves but there will be a few fun peaks at the better exposed combo breaks.

Winds will be similar to Thursday…sort of light and variable to light out of the S-SE in the morning with some W winds 10-14 knots on tap in the afternoon. Overcast and gloomy in the morning with sun burning through by the afternoon.



Again it won’t be great, or consistent, tomorrow but the surf will be on the clean side and there will be enough energy for us to at least have a little fun. Water is starting to warm up too…HB was probably close to the low-mid 60’s today. I would still plan on your smaller wave gear or even longboards just so you can maximize the fun.

Here are the tides…

12:40AM LDT 4.2 H
08:57AM LDT 0.5 L
04:34PM LDT 3.3 H
08:25PM LDT 3.0 L

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why does your blog's forecast not seem like it matches up to what's on WaveWatch? Your blog says smaller but WaveWatch shows an increasing WNW windswell for Friday and a corresponding increase in wave size. Was most of Thursday's energy from the SSW which is decreasing for Friday?

Anonymous said...

The increasing energy on WaveWatch looks like it's short period (6s).

Unknown said...

Guys,

I totally understand the confusion. The wavewatch 7-day chart, which is what I am assuming that you are looking at, is generated off of the actual NOAA WavewatchIII data. I don't actually get to select what it displays. Unfortunately it was built before I became part of the Wavewatch Forecast Team...I would have probably built something different, or at least made it more clear as to what data you are seeing.

I am not sure which sub-region you are looking at on the wavewatch.com site but each of the regions is initialized off a different position in the wave model. Some of the points are a little further off the beach than the others and it will be more exposed to a NW windswell, and actually show more size than will be breaking at the beach.

The best way to use that 7-day model is to treat it as a graphical representation of the WWIII wave model...not really a surf forecast...but more of a swell forecast for that fixed point.

I would use the 7-day as a guide but look for the surf information in my written forecast.

Hope that helps to make some sense of it.

Adam

Anonymous said...

Or they could just use the bouy data and figure out their spots themselves ;)

Forecasting a week in advance does take skill. Forecasting tomorrow is pretty straight forward.

Anonymous said...

surfline..socalsurf..wetsand...all say different stuff every day. I wish there was just one that was accurate.

Anonymous said...

it various from spot to spot, man. duhh!