Friday’s Surf – Slow start but building through the day

Friday will be a surf day…but don’t expect a ton of waves to show through the morning.

We will have new W-NW swell (275-300) and some new SW swell (200-215+220) that will both start to arrive early Friday morning…it will take several hours for them to fill in and they will have to push past yet another early morning high tide. Wave heights will be on the rise as we move throughout the day and the top WNW-NW facing spots in the Northern Counties (well basically just Ventura) can expect to see more size earlier in the day. Same goes for the SW facing breaks… spots in OC and North SD that like the SW swell direction will also start to see some new, but inconsistent, sets creeping in a little earlier than the other areas.

Morning


Midday


Afternoon


For the morning, look for most breaks to continue to hold around knee-waist high+ with some chest-shoulder high waves pushing through occasionally. Standout breaks, mostly the WNW facing spots in Ventura, will be more in the chest-shoulder high range with some bigger head high sets now and then. By the afternoon all spots will be starting to see more consistent chest-shoulder high sets while the WNW standouts and the excellent combo breaks see some chest-head high surf and some inconsistent overhead sets…possibly even a bit bigger if the swell comes in with more energy in the long-periods.

Winds look light in the morning…mostly below 10 knots…sort of variable in direction depending on the county, but still weak enough to keep things at least semi-clean. NW winds around 10-14 knots move in later in the afternoon.



Like I said it looks like Friday will be surf day…though it will be hard to be patient while waiting for the swells to fill in. The winds for some reason seem a little sketchy to me, at least based on the last wind model I looked at…hopefully it will get nice and cold tonight and stomp on the little bit of funkiness that I was seeing. Water quality should be improving as well…we have had a couple of dry days and most spots have lost the tint of chocolately foulness that we had earlier in the week. Drop me some surf reports tomorrow…I like to hear how the swell is filling in.

Make sure to check out the regional forecasts for the details for each county.

Regional/County Forecasts

Santa Barbara Surf Forecast
Ventura County Surf Forecast
Los Angeles County Surf Forecast
Orange County Surf Forecast
San Diego Surf Forecast

Here are the tides…

02/12/2010 Friday
01:52AM LST 1.6 L
07:48AM LST 5.4 H
02:51PM LST -0.6 L
09:01PM LST 3.9 H