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Let me list a few sites that I find most helpful:
Stormsurf.com
Surfline.com
Wetsand.com
Bajainsider.com
I use these sites in combination to obtain a variety of
data and interpretation. I believe Bajainsider.com is the single best
site to watch weather in the
 Cape Region. When the tropical season is
active, Bajainsider.com has gone out of their way to provide all the
information possible in their Weather Pages. The other sites provide
information for the greater Pacific Ocean.
Go to Stormsurf.com. There you will find numerous pages
of information, surf reports and surf forecasts. The Pacific Forecast
gives you probably more details than you want, but they track each storm
from its origin to its demise and interpret how it will affect the surf.
The Pacific Quick cast is an abridged version of the Forecast. The
Chartroom is where they show weather charts, satellite photos and animated
forecast charts. I find that if you look at Surf Reports rather than Surf
Forecasts in the Chartroom you get the most information.
What I find most informative are the charts showing the
Wave Models. Theses charts are paired showing wave height and period
(the interval between the swells). The Period Chart can be
interpreted like a normal weather chart, but here you are looking at the
“fronts” of energy passing through the Pacific rather than the “fronts” of
air pressure and direction that show on a regular weather chart.
These wave fronts are presented in animation as well. You can watch
the approach of a wave front as it moves away from the storm that
generated it.
Wetsand.com is the least informative, but they give an easy to read graph
of the major swell showing its height and the direction from which it
comes.
The direction of the swell is a key piece of information.
Again, look at a map or visualize the rounded end of the peninsula, the
Cape region. As the Cape gently curves, the many rocky points
allow the swell to present itself in many different settings and across
different bottoms. You can drive along the coast until you find a
point that is producing a wave just the way you like it. As you
become familiar with the terrain, you learn the optimum direction for each
area and then you can keep track of incoming swells and do your own surf
forecasting. The East Cape offers countless
breaks, each reacting differently as the swell comes from
different directions. A swell generated by a storm below New Zealand
coming from approx. 200 degrees will break in the Corridor and out the
East Cape near Shipwrecks and 9 Palms. A swell coming from the
Antarctic below Chile will come from approx. 130 degrees and may break as
far around the Cape as Cabo Pulmo. And there are dozens of breaks that
will pick up the same swell and create a variety of waves.
The same principle applies to the Pacific side of the Cape
in the winter. The key factor for the Pacific side is that for a
swell to get to Southern Baja directly it must come from west of 300
degrees. Such a storm would be located west of the International
Dateline and optimally just off the coast of northern Asia around the
Kamchatka Peninsula. When swells are generated east of the Dateline
in the Gulf of Alaska the
 swell
is blocked by the western most part of the North American Continent, the
area that is Oregon and Northern California. Swells do refract or
wrap around landmasses, but it takes a very strong swell to wrap far
enough around North America to make it to Baja Sur. A map will show
that Cabo San Lucas is on a line connecting Denver and Albuquerque and
thus far east of true north. Thus a swell has to come from the
northwest to affect Baja Sur.
 In
summer, the wildcard is tropical weather. There can be a dozen or
more tropical systems that originate in the Eastern Pacific along the
Mexican coast each summer between June and November. Often
they move quickly to the west along 10 North latitude and are not noticed
in Baja. But sometimes they form near Acapulco and come north along
the coast. If such a storm stalls, it can generate a swell that
produces waves in Baja. The key factors are how far away the storm
is from the Cape, how long it stalls, how strong the winds are and how
local weather conditions interfere with the waves. Tropical systems,
or chubascos, often come ashore in the Cape Region. Then there are
waves, but storm conditions make it unsurfable.
If you are in a position to get up and come to Baja at the
approach of a swell, you can, in this day and age, keep track of what is
going on from anywhere in the world. The Stormsurf.com site gives
one more helpful piece of information. When a significant swell is
generated, they give it a number, #1S for the first Southern Hemi swell
and so on and #1N for the first winter swell from the north. This
helps you to recognize when there is the potential for really good waves.
And you don’t have to guess when the surf’s up! |
st) in summer.
This is a huge area of ocean that extends all the way south to the icepack
of Antarctica. Fortunately for surfers in the computer age there are many
resources to keep track of weather all through the Pacific.
