Waves for Wednesday – Fading swell and sketchy weather

Wednesday will have some waves but with the weather expected to get all weird and the winds being a pain in the ass I don’t think it will be much of a surf day for most people.

Swellwise we are going to see a mix of dropping WNW swell (280-300) and some background S-SW swell mix from the Southern Hemi.



Most spots will be in the waist-chest high range with some chest high+ sets at times. The standout NW breaks, again in the usually “better on NW swells” regions of Ventura, the South Bay, and San Diego, expect surf in the chest-shoulder high range with some sets going head high.

Winds and weather look funky…the forecast models are calling for a fast moving cold front to push through sometime on Wednesday and in the process mix in a weird pocket of moisture as it does. The current weather forecast is for cloudy skies and a chance of rain for the morning, with increasing onshore winds and showers for the afternoon, particularly up towards the Santa Barbara and Ventura areas.

Check out the COAMPS forecast for tomorrow morning…this is showing about 5am. According to this it looks like variable onshore/side shore winds for Ventura/SB. Offshore E winds for LA…and then onshore winds again down in San Diego and Orange County. When I see things like this on the forecast I mentally label it “unstable”, which usually means the model doesn’t know what is going to happen and is just picking random crap to show us.



That being said...I don’t think we should completely write-off tomorrow morning, there are some waves which, unless the wind is for sure howling onshore, means that it will be worth at least a cam-check in the morning. I wouldn’t plan on a lot of surfing, or it even being that great of surf if the winds are light…but at least there would be something to ride. Anyway conditions look a lot better later this week and into the weekend (more waves too)…you might want butter up the warden by doing a few chores...so you can score some in a few days.

Here are the tides…

12/30/2009 Wednesday
12:50AM LST 2.1 L
07:05AM LST 6.6 H (you suck tide!)
02:40PM LST -1.4 L
09:05PM LST 3.6 H