where is it?

[mudguts]

http://www.swellnet.com.au/forecast.php ... state_id=2

this is giving me some slim hope.


but where the hell is it???????

i hate no surf.

[puurri]

a little pulse through abt 3PM, more visible out on horizon. maybe more abt MON_TUES. read Scripps Institute web site

[Gone_West]

what, did you really think it would be 4-5ft today?

IMO, expect maybe a tiny little pulse tomorrow arvo 1-2ft or so. It might be 2ft+ on late Mon/early Tues

[dammit__01]

yer thermalben got it wrong i think altho he is gonna say he didnt wait for his rebuttle

[One Mile Point]

yer thermalben got it wrong i think altho he is gonna say he didnt wait for his rebuttle

it was alex zadnik, probaly was bigger on the south coast and newy

[mudguts]

well, of course i didnt think it was going to be 5 foot, but i expected a bit.
as it turned out i got a little surf on dark on saturday. i chased the swell south early on sunday for f all tho.

[marty]

yer thermalben got it wrong i think altho he is gonna say he didnt wait for his rebuttle

swellnet do forecasts which are guides - not gospel.
cut them some slack.

south-magnets was the key point in the forecast. not that i surfed over the weekend (nor did i go looking for waves).

[barstardos]

Originally I agreed with the Swellnet call, as it looked like the swell event would be like a similar event this time last year (see last years forum thread http://forum.realsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3209 )

The setup of the swell all looked good but in my opinion the bulk of the swell was generated too far north to swing around the corner of Tasmania and reach the E coast with any real size. I checked all the S swell magnets right through Saturday and did not surf at all.

Quickscat from last thursday shows that the bulk of the fetch was outside the swell window
http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/qsc ... ole_as.png

[thermalben]

It was certainly one of the most amazing swell events I've ever seen, of which I'm doing a comprehensive writeup on it at the moment.

Bastardos - agreed, that part of the fetch was too far north. What about the next Quikscat pass taken 12 hours later? There's still a large fetch of 50-60kts of SW wind in that pass (stronger than what generated the 20' surf off the NSW South Coast a month prior), the bulk of which is more than adequately located to favour the NSW coast to some degree.

The main problem was a lack of captured fetch. We thought that the sheer strength of the wind would overcome this, but obviously it didn't happen.

It's worth noting that Qld picked up the forecast size range (1-2' s-facing beaches) from this swell though - and there's even more refraction required for that to happen!

[panaitan]

I managed to "score" a handful of head high pulses at around mid-day on Saturday down the south coast at known south facing magnets, but it dropped a little for the rest of the day.

[thermalben]

yer thermalben got it wrong i think altho he is gonna say he didnt wait for his rebuttle

dammit_01, I'm struggling to actually decipher what you've written, but it appears that somewhere in there you've written "he is gonna say he didn't".

Let me just say that if I get a forecast wrong, I'm the first person to point it out. I've got no problems admitting that I occasionally stuff it up. Everyone has a bad day at the office, and so do weather forecasters - but unfortunately, 30,000 people know when we're having a bad day (some of which decide to remind us of that fact). That's a little bit different to most other jobs.

Swellnet was never set up with the intention of it becoming the business that it is now - I love to assess weather data and prepare forecasts, simple as that. The only way to assess your accuracy is to verify your forecast against what actually occurs. By identifying when you get it wrong, and when you get it right, your skills improve - much like anything other job.

Saturday's swell was overcalled - no question about that at all. However, I now have another significant swell event locked into the archives that I'll be able to reference in the future, in the event that we see something similar.

[barstardos]

So Ben, when you refer to "captured fetch" i guess you mean the amount of time that the fetch was effectively generating swell within the swell window. Based on the Quikscat runs it looks like we had a breif pulse of less than 24 hours of 50kt+ in the swell window for E coast as the low slipped away to the SE. Bummer

Alex has already called it - keep a close eye on a similar system next weekend - it better aligned and looks like it will deliver the follow through to ensure we have a good captured fetch and something solidly surfable on the E coast.