Random Tropical Alert – East Coast - Hurricane Bill

Yep, Hurricane Bill is a beast.

He is a well positioned, moving in a great direction, his core wind speeds are holding around 105-knots with gusts to 130-knots (156-mph) and he is set to light up the East Coast with hurricane swell.



Check out how well developed he is in the satellite photo…I didn’t even draw hurricanes that perfect my notebook when I was in school…



Hurricane bill is intense, large, and moving right at the East Coast. To put the cherry on the sundae, the storm veers off before it gets to land, giving the East Coast a full shot of swell but without the deadly 100+ knot winds…and since he makes the re-curve motion close to the coast…Bill gets a chance to send waves to pretty much the whole stretch of coast from Florida on up through Nova Scotia.

Check out some of these nearshore model images that I pulled from Stormsurf.com (again thanks to Mark Sponsler for letting me copy a few images now and then). Click on the links below the image for the live model run on Stormsurf.com.



http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display.cgi?a=jax



http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display.cgi?a=hat



http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display.cgi?a=nj

Those models aren’t lying…there is a very real chance of the swell getting massive as Hurricane Bill grinds in close to the coast.

The swell model for a stretch of coast up by New York and New Jersey is calling for nearly 16’ of deepwater swell at 15-second periods. Unreal.

Anyways…the initial energy from Bill, lets call it the more “survivable” energy for good-times sake, arrives through the day on Friday…particularly for Florida and the Mid-Atlantic States. The swell builds quickly everywhere else as we move throughout the day on Friday.

The peak of the swell hits Saturday afternoon, and really it doesn’t look healthy to be in the water at an “exposed” spot when this swell peaks. The East Coast generally doesn’t have the right sort of sea-floor to allow these waves to keep quality shape once it gets this big. Most breaks will be drifty massive churning messes.

That being said…this is a good opportunity to check spots that normally wouldn’t break…say something deep inside bays and harbors that only get a fraction of the energy hitting the main spots. I bet there will be a bunch of crazy obscure nuggets working all over.

Anyway…if any of you guys are out on the East Coast…stay safe and good luck!