Every forecast app in the world reduces a complicated ocean to a row of stars. That is fine if you surf twice a year. If you are trying to decide whether to get out of bed at half five in January, you want the raw numbers instead — and there are only four that matter.
1. Swell period, before swell height
Period is the number of seconds between wave crests, and it is the single most useful figure on the page. A 1.5 metre swell at 8 seconds is local wind slop that will close out on the sandbar. The same 1.5 metres at 14 seconds is a groundswell that has travelled from the North Atlantic, carries far more energy, and will stand up properly on the reef.
As a rule of thumb: under 9 seconds is windswell, 10 to 12 is decent, and anything over 13 is worth rearranging your day for.
2. Swell direction against the coast
A west-facing beach needs a west swell. Obvious — except that most breaks have a much narrower window than their orientation suggests, because of headlands, offshore banks and the angle of the reef. Learn the window for your two or three local spots and you will stop driving to the wrong one.
Our home break faces roughly west-north-west and works best between 280 and 300 degrees. Outside that, the swell wraps and loses half its size.
3. Wind, and specifically the gust figure
Mean wind speed is only half the story. A forecast of 12 knots offshore gusting 30 will be unpleasant; 18 knots offshore gusting 20 will be beautiful. The gap between mean and gust tells you how organised the airflow is.
Offshore is not automatically good, either. A hard offshore on a shallow reef will hold waves up until they break too late, and you will spend the session getting pitched.
4. Tide, and the state of the sandbar
This is the number no app can help you with, because it depends entirely on what the last month of storms did to the sand. Keep a note on your phone: date, tide state, and whether it was any good. After a winter you will have a personal tide chart worth more than any forecast subscription.
Putting it together
The best sessions we get here are 1.2 to 1.8 metres at 12 to 14 seconds from 290 degrees, light easterly, two hours either side of low. That is four numbers and a tide state. It took about three years of note-keeping to work out, and it has been worth more than every star rating we have ever read.
Write yours down. Then stop looking at the stars.
