Surfing / Reef McIntosh, who’s always a standout in big waves.

Surfing Mag Mark Healey’s wave | Surfing Mag.

Balaram Stack under the lip in Costa Rica

A massive swell on the build today, solid 8-10ft this morning with extreme onshore winds blasting upto 50kmph at report time, so complete write off for surfing today – Look for winds to change to SW tomorrow and then easing around mid-week – Swell will continue to build.

Muriwai

Very messy surf day with strong and gusty westerly winds blasting the coast, a huge swell is on the build for this week, already 6-8ft with bigger sets. Look for a SW wind change for tuesday.

Raglan

Extreme onshore winds this morning and solid wind groundswell in the 6-8ft+ range building further today – winds will stay strong and gusty westerly today shifting to SW tomorrow. Wednesday the winds should ease back more.

Mount Maunganui

Cold and blustery westerly cross shore winds this morning blowing out remaining swell today. 1-1.5ft at report time easing quickly, poor surfing today.

Why only these locations? Because these are the places I surf.

The swell was certainly there but the tide was very low and the waves were hitting the bank and closing out for the first part of the session. Once some water started to come in there was a bit of a shoulder and we started to get a few rides rather than just a take off, cover up and pray.

In the end I had a good wave count and came away with some good waves for me, my count was 11, 9, and 1.

So that’s 11 waves, 9 good maneuvers and 1 major wipe out. The lack of maneuvers was due to the wave not having a shoulder to work with so you had to just pull in to the barrel and ride it until you got smashed.

The surf report for Piha today was:
Good surfing on this morning with an easing SW groundswell in the 3-4ft range with 5ft sets still slowly easing through today, winds are light offshore so clean and good waves to be had. Light winds forecast so possible sea breezes for later on.

Met Service details for today were.

Swell 2.5 metres
Direction SW
Period 12 Seconds
Wind NW 2 knots
High tide 2.29pm
Low tide 8.51 am

Surfing Mag

Mark decided he would have a sleep in so at 6am I was off on the 1 hour trip to our usual spot.

I was optimistic with about 15 mins to go because there was mist on the river and obviously no wind, woohoo I’ve lucked in I thought.

Unfortunately at the beach the wind was howling, absolutely going off. Yes there was swell but the entire place was blown out. I would guess those winds were at least 25knots.

So no session today, just a lot of driving.

With that in mind we decided to postpone our early morning session and make it an afternoon one.

The met service though suggested that the swell had not only picked up but it had come in full time with the swell supposedly 2.5 metres & 11 secs onto a high tide at 5.49pm and winds dropping to 6knots  southerly.

When we pulled into the carpark we were surprised, very surprised.

The swell was going off but the wind was still howling and the entire bay looked like a huge washing machine.

Paddle time anyway we decided (only because we have the travelator down in the pocket or it would have been go home time).

A right hander was coming in and hitting a little bank inside the pocket which because it was sheltered from the southerly wind actually ended up providing a reasonable session.

Over all though it was only a 4 out of 10.

According to the met service we should have a 1.5 m swell from the west with 18 knots of SW wind, 12 sec swell period and a high tide at 11.52am, theoretically still pretty good.

We arrived at 7am this morning and as I mentioned it was a groan,,,WTF happened to all the swell? It was tiny, probably 1m max however the good news was that there was next to no wind until around 9am.

I picked up a few larger sets out at the 2nd reef until the incoming tide killed it and I moved inside to pick up a few smallish left handers which were OK until the tide again killed it.

Today would be about a 4 and only because I caught plenty of waves and the small inside left had a reasonable shoulder to work with.