Forecasting Vic

[alakaboo]

Living where I do at the moment I've got 90 miles of pretty much dead straight coast, surely there's something that would cause certain stretches of it to work better than others at different times?

bgreen gives you some good pointers in their post.
another idea is to find some old beach fishermen, and ask them where they find the gutters and rips at different times of the year, tides, weather patterns etc..

i learnt how to read waves while standing on the beach, and first learnt where to stand from my grandfather and his tailor-fishing mates.

cusps and tide heights can be more important than the swell itself.

[oldman]

another idea is to find some old beach fishermen, and ask them where they find the gutters and rips at different times of the year, tides, weather patterns etc..

Good point. Most fishos know more about the beach than the surfers.

Long beaches, 90 mile beach, 7 mile beach at Shoalhaven, lots of them up and down the coast, are generally fairly poor in terms of banks.

A long beach tends towards a longshore drift/rip which tends to line up the banks. You end up with a shorebreak, a gutter, a straight sand bank, a gutter, usually another sandbank beyond that which only becomes obvious in the biggest swells. The effect is that the length of the beach tends to straighten the waves up before they hit the beach, and the banks are straight so you end up with closeouts up and down the beach.

As others suggest, look for any breaks in the beach, creeks feeding into it are best. They will feed the banks and break up the straight lines. Otherwise get on it after storm swells have moved the banks around.

Try to keep track of seasonal drift/movement of sand along the beach.

[steve shearer]

Sand movement/formation is crucial to this stretch of coast as well Mical.

Sand tends to travel in slugs, and settle in slugs.
At least a couple times a week I'll recco the coast, particularly from vantage points and try and identify the position of sand slugs.
That way under varying sea states and longshore drifts I can have a crack at estimating where sand is likely to settle before, during and after swell events.
The first couple of days of a new sandbar are often the shallowest/hollowest and most uncrowded.