Surfing and Wind

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Surfing and wind conditions are as closely tied as swell conditions. Strong onshore wind will always create lousy surf conditions. Sideshore wind can be OK. Offshore wind is almost always a good thing unless it is too darned strong...like in excess of 20mph, which can happen sometimes.

I think many surfers just starting assume that all the California beaches face West. On closer inspection, that is not the case. They face different directions and sometimes a subtle difference makes one spot happen when another one doesn't.

The Half Moon Bay Jetty faces SW, so forget it with the onshore south rain winds. However, the NW wind that blows everything else out around will blow sideshore, with surf conditions being possible. Ocean Beach will just be plain blown out with any strong wind that isn't easterly, except for a dead N wind that blows sideshore...but not too strong.

There are also geographic factors that can help. For example, South winds that usually come in with our storms blow offshore at Linda Mar. The beach faces WNW so you would expect it to not be as blown out as much as the Half Moon Bay Jetty, but not "offshore". There is something about the Linda Mar valley that "funnels" that wind right offshore. I have seen the same thing with NW wind at Drakes Beach at Point Reyes. It's funneled into strong offshore wind right in front of the parking lot there. The cliffs on either side blocking some of it so that the offshore wind is not as strong on either side of that parking lot.

I use weatherbug (download it to your desktop) to track the wind conditions. There is one at The San Francisco Zoo and one at Manuel Cunha School in Half Moon Bay. Not only can I tell what the wind is doing before I head to one of those spots, I can tell if there is a difference between the two. There can be significant differences that point me as to which direction to head in, since I live in between.

Weather.com provides fairly good wind forecast, although the wind on the coast is the hardest thing to predict as compared to swell and tide, which are fairly easy to predict these days. Some patterns are pretty strong though. Big high pressure right over us, glassy. Big high pressure between Utah and Nevada, offshore. Storm winds most of the time S to SW wind. Spring time, alot of NW blowing everything out except the HMB Jetty.

Surfing and wind. NW wind blowing 15mph onshore at Linda Mar.