August

[steve shearer]

We're all just sidestepping the main issue here anyway.
Conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room.

[oldman]

We're all just sidestepping the main issue here anyway.
Conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room.

Which one Steve?

[Donweather]

Love your forecast Steve. Reads beautifully and gives everyone all the information required to make a very informed decision without giving it to them on a plater!!!

Keep up the good work mate and I hope ya score some fun ones south of the border over the weekend!!!

[Shane Peel]

I love this thread, you guys are like junkies talking about some gear they heard was coming in across the next week or so and are all frothing on the hope it will be better than the last hit! The thing I think is most interesting is that we ALL seem happy to look beyond anything that MAY prove it wrong and that binds a VERY jaded and cynical bunch of fcukers together despite more different views than a goldie high-rise. The best thread on RS (besides the poo diary) is the weather God it's despicable!
PS. I would love some info on how I can judge the dominant component in a swell V the submissive component ie how big is the W part of one SW swell compared to another, not the direction the actual height and period cause some of our reefs here are drastically different even taking into account tides and moon etc on SW's that model the same. Direction is so crucial here and the strongest part of a direction even more important it seems!

[steve shearer]

Thanks for the "august: contribution Shane.
Trust you to want to know about dominant and submissive......

I'm no Indo vet but I could surmise that based on the very well known nature of the storm track it would be pretty easy to start hindcasting swell events and building up a knowledge bank of fetch orientations and strengths and how they actually play out as surfable waves.

IE a fetch that reaches maximum strength of X knots in X part of the Indian ocean with X wind direction becomes a SW swell of X period with directional charcteristics that favour Spot X,Y,Z.
KNow what I mean?
That way you'll be able to tease out the subtle meta-data which has such an effect on an actual swell's particular characteristics.

[SAsurfa]

As Steve has touched on Shane, if you follow the storm closely, you will be able to identify how much west or south or any direction is in the swell by identifying the critical periods of the storms formation and extrapolating from there.

This is the problem with buoyweather or other such products. It only shows the largest swell train at that point. Therefore if you have a 2m swell at 18 seconds from the SW, but then strong northerly winds across the location creating a 2.1m windswell, the buoyweather chart will show 4.1m from the north, masking the groundswell and over representing the windswell.

Works the other way as well

[Donweather]

This is the problem with buoyweather or other such products. It only shows the largest swell train at that point. Therefore if you have a 2m swell at 18 seconds from the SW, but then strong northerly winds across the location creating a 2.1m windswell, the buoyweather chart will show 4.1m from the north, masking the groundswell and over representing the windswell.

Craig, are you sure about the above? I've never used buoyweather (don't rate it actually), but as for the other umpteen WW3 click and point location sites on the web I can't say I've ever seen them add the two different swell heights together. 9 times out of 10, they'll just show the largest swell height (irrespective of the period of that swell). I do note that they tend to average out the periods and swell directions somewhat though. So from what I've seen, and taking your example above, most websites would call it 2.1m@9 sec from the NW.

[Quangers]

Just say I was planning on 'getting sick' one day this week - which one would you guys suggest for the far south coast?

[SAsurfa]

Don, just had some discussions with Ben and they don't use either of our ways of representing the wave heights. Apparantely an algorithm is used to combine the different swell trains and the end result is somewhere between our methods. Will have to have a look into it a bit deeper to see how they manipulate the data.

[Donweather]

they don't use either of our ways of representing the wave heights. Apparantely an algorithm is used to combine the different swell trains and the end result is somewhere between our methods.

"They" being bouyweather? or all WW3 web based software?

[oldman]

We're all just sidestepping the main issue here anyway.
Conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room.

I spent all weekend looking around Steve and there were no elephants, at least none remotely close to Sydney, outside the Taronga Park zoo borders that is.

And no prospects of any elephants for a while yet.

Perhaps you were talking about northern NSW/SE qld, elephants, a completely different species.

Love your forecast Steve. Reads beautifully and gives everyone all the information required to make a very informed decision without giving it to them on a plater!!!

What fecking forecast? Elephant forecasting?

Crikey Don, don't encourage him.

[SAsurfa]

All WW3 Don, will post an example tomorrow.

[oldman]

All WW3 Don, will post an example tomorrow.

Feck, when did World War 3 start.

Why didn't anyone tell me about it.

[oldman]

Somehow Nick missed out on the fact that among all this dribble were forecasts of a solid east north east swell to hit Sydney.

He seems to have forgotten that even he got in on the act.

I reckon we could well see some 6ft+ bomb sets come Tues!!!

Ok, that was for sunny coast, but still ........

Well done gentlemen

[oldman]

This won't be likely to do much at all, and in particular won't be creating a large shorter period south easterly swell intersecting with a much longer period east nor east swell for NSW beaches.

And it won't last long, and it won't repeat a similar pattern out to 180 hours, and there isn't much energy in the Tasman and Coral seas at the moment.

Is that Ok you weird internet nazis who think a realsurf forum is the butterfly's wings that determine whether that slight trough turns into a cyclone?

With apologies to Nick for not setting him straight.

[barstardos]

Had to reorganise my schedule - didnt make it to tassie this week.

But i did make it to Puerto Steyne this morning!

[SAsurfa]

^^How good was it Barstados!

I was out before first light as I was yesterday but today was a totally different palying field. Clean and peaky 4-5ft waves with the odd bigger sneaker still rolling through during the first hour or so of light.

The crowd was on it as soon as the sun popped up and I notice the swell backed off in size and consistency in the 2hrs I was out there, but god it was fun! Got some great waves and saw some hectic wipeouts as well

Stoked

[barstardos]

I paddled out at 6 and somehow ended up missing my bus at 8am. In fact I missed a lot of things this morning but epic waves was not one of them
Amazing morning - quite peaky and a little bit random. A couple of my waves are definitely being filed away in memory banks as keepers. Some of the sets that landed on my head were also memorable.