With all this wonky weather happening it's worth reflecting on the fact that sometimes weird weather systems bring with them some pretty awesome surf conditions. This happened back on the 26 March 1981. A rather innocuous looking cold front made it's way to PE, didn't appear to be anything special to the forecasters. But then things went pear-shaped once it hit PE, and it resulted in floods....and some all-time Baked Beans. How all-time? Well - this lowly surf spot made a full page in the Zag! Don't think a shot from there has ever featured since! Thanks to Jonty Hansford for the article. Above is the article as it ran in the June issue of Zag. Below I've just broken it up into bits so you can read the text and check the pics better.
Yrrrr, ou's are gonna be losing their marbles soon if this flat spell lasts any longer. This has been a pretty horrendous run of zero swell and onshores. I decided to go crunch some numbers to see just how bad "bad" actually is. And the outcome? Bad. Very bad!! I checked out the weather stats for October and November, and they make rather kak reading. Basically each month had only 6 surfable days (we're talking the bay here - so not wildside or seals etc). By "surfable" I mean when you have the combination of a SW wind and a swell of over 2m, with a swell period of over 11 seconds. Now that is actually hardly decent surf in anyone's books, but that's how low I had to set the benchmark in order to come up with some workable stats!! October saw only 2 days that had swell periods of over 14 seconds - which is generally the sort of period you're looking for in order to get surf with some punch. Of the 8 days that had both the offshore and a bit of swell coinciding - 4 had such hectic wind that it was hardly worth the effort. November didn't get any better - 6 surfable days of which 4 the wind was pomping. Only 2 days with a decent swell period, and one of those was onshore! Looking back at the Photo Galleries for 2011 and 2010 on the site - there were 14 up for Oct/Nov last year, and 16 for Oct/Nov 2010. This year? Seven. Eish.
So yah, a sad story all in all. 60 days and only 12 surfable by "ideal" standards. If you're into onshore bowls then you were probably managed to rack up more than 12 days surfing, altho given the lack of swell it would've had to be small onshore bowls! Summer surf in the bay can really test your patience....so if you're wanting to get wet regularly you're going to have to fill up the petrol tank and head outside the bay. Plenty of nooks and crannies out there if you're prepared to go looking. Just watch out for the pearlies and the great whites! Summer see's the juveniles pull in to the exposed beaches to chow, so keep your eye's peeled! You aren't on the menu, but it doesn't hurt to keep a lookout. Oh, and just to REALLY make your day - looks like this run of east wind is set to continue. Just a quick swing to south on Saturday and Monday, but otherwise east, east, east. Ask Santa for a West!!!! Summer rocks. Sunny skies, warm water, boardies. What more could you want? Skin cancer? Probably not! That sun fries peeps. It might be kiff to get that nice buff tanned look, but just make sure it doesn't come at a price you don't wanna pay. There's nothing naff about loading on the sunscreen to protect that pretty face of yours. Sure, Kelly might reckon you don't need sunscreen you just gotto eat right. But being the best surfer in the world doesn't make you a leading authority on skin care. Anyway, if anyone can put up their hand and say they eat as healthy as Kelly, sure, go ahead and ditch the sunscreen. But that means you eat 90% raw food like seeds, nuts, fruit, drink mainly water, hardly any alcohol etc....willing to bet none of you do that. So then listen up... So for all you ou’s going yada, yada, yada about putting stuff on your face, do it. Cos you only got that 1 layer of skin, and if you burn it bad, it’s burnt for good. Not cool. Not only do you want to avoid skin cancer, but you also don’t want to look like a crusty sea-dog when you hit 40. Sunblock is a very, very important addition to your surf equipment collection. We definitely have a good chance of getting skin cancer cos of the time we spend out in the water. Both sand and water reflect UV rays, so we get dealt a double whammy. And don’t think if the sun’s not out you’re safe, those UV rays pass straight through the clouds, just looking for a face to fry. It’s totally worth the bucks investing in a decent face sunscreen. Cheap is nasty as far as sunscreen goes. It’s a bit of a juggle cos obviously you want something that’s going to protect your skin, stay on for at least a coupla hours in the water, not turn your face into zit-city, and not run into your eyes and sting like crazy. I fried my face stukkend a few years ago, and really stuffed up my skin. Nothing like living in the UK for 2 years to make you white like a sheet, and then forgetting to put sunscreen on on your first day back home (early December) and then heading out to surf for 6 hours. Was always gonna end in a bugger-up…or in this case, a bad burn! And a permanent set of freckles. So now I’m paranoid about putting on sunscreen, and lank fussy about what products I use. Did some serious research into what was decent and what wasn't. Make sure your sunblock protects against both UVA and UVB rays. SPF is a multiplier that indicates how long the sunscreen will increase your bodies natural defenses against UVB radiation. Essentially, if your skin could naturally handle 10 minutes in the sun, then putting SPF 30 on would mean you could handle 300 minutes. The hiccup is that the organic chemicals are being broken down from the second you put the sunscreen on, and so the effectiveness of a sunscreen is constantly decreasing. Sunscreens marked "Water-Resistant" are rated after 40 minutes of submersion. So an SPF 30 that boasts “Water Resistance,” might have started off much stronger, but is still rated 30 at the end of the test. The best rating for surfers is “Very Water-Resistant,” in which a sunscreen is rated after 80-minutes of submersion It helps heaps to have a sunscreen that has physical as well as chemical blockers. So you want some zinc or titanium dioxide in there. These literally sit on the outside of your skin reflecting the UV rays. Put your sunscreen on at least 20 minutes before you paddle out. So soon as you pull into the carpark put that on first, before you start messing about with wetties and boards and wax etc.It actually takes your skin this long to react to the sunblock and get the full effect, allowing your skin to absorb most of the lotion. A bonus is you won’t get as much runoff in your eyes. Here's some good face sunscreens I've tested out you can get at your local Dischem, chemist or Surf Centre.
Win a tube of BronzincShewee, the water was ball-numbingly cold this morning. Well, at least according to the guys who were mad enough to venture out there to start with. Weak 1-2ft 8 second swell didn't exactly have me running for my board, and just as well. A jog across the road and a cursory toe dipped into the water revealed that indeed there were ice blocks about! Plenty of shell-shocked lil crabs on the beach. Don't blame them, I'd also get the hell outta there at that temperature. Yesterdays Herald article mentioned upwelling offshore as being the reason behind all the cold water, so I decided to check it out. I've mentioned it before in one of my blogs, but hadn't gone into too much detail. How it works is as follows: we have the 'warm' Agulhas current running southwards from Moz down towards Cape Town along the deg of the continental shelf. It's pretty quick, running at about 5-10k's an hour and reaching down to a depth of around 1000m. Cos it's flowing so quickly it causes a dynamic upwelling of cold water from under the current itself which spins up and onto the shelf. Then what happens is that you get these inshore eddies forming on the landward side of the current (again cos it's moering along at such a pace), and these lil things spin off the edge of the current and head straight towards us, carrying that nasty cold water with them. Add some east winds to that - and that just fast tracks the cold water right into the bay. And herein lies the rub - it's gonna get worse! Climate change is heating up the oceans, meaning there's plenty more energy stored in them. And that's kinda like giving the Agulhus current the equivalent of a Red Bull. The thing is now running on serious juice, and picking up some extra speed. What it's doing is then just amplifying everything that happens in the system. So where we had some upwelling of moderately cold water, now we're gonna have lank upwelling of ice-cream headache water. Port Alfred seems to be the main lucky winner in the whole scenario, with a seriously cold upwelling system happening just offshore there. Problem is, with all the east winds, that cold stuff's just getting blown our way. It might have a coupla interesting complications for us, beyond just making us shiver in the surf. There's a theory that maybe the freezing water just offshore is trapping some big fish in the bay - which is maybe why there've been a lot more sightings of our toothy friends? Also, you definitely don't want to be trying to fly outta PE in the early mornings anymore. Fog seems to be coming more of a regular occurrence due to the warm air temps and icy water. Fog = no planes landing = you got up early to get to the airport for nothing! Remember that when booking your tickets kids. Anyhow, kudos to Wes and his mates for braving the 14C water this morning with nothing other than boardies and chest hairs. They actually managed to hold out for 30 minutes, and then only got in cos the waves were just really kak. Respect. Glad to see there're still some tough ou's left! Eish, amazing how well social networking sites work these days. Well, let's clarify that comment - they get news out there, fast. However, they also have a nasty habit of being a bit like that broken telephone game we used to play as kids.
Information gets somewhat twisted and distorted as it travels around FB, Twitter, emails and the like. Case in point was how last week I got 3 emails telling me about massive surf hitting Vic Bay - problem was, the shots were from the big storm of 2008! But some ou had started an email claiming they were from that morning - and ended up suckering plenty peeps into believing his hoax. So yesterday it was the earthquake off PE that hit the news. Everyone started talking about tsunami's and the like. Anyhow, it turned out to be nothing more than a storm in a tea-cup. The quake was moersa far offshore, 2130km off our coast to be exact. That's like halfway to Antarctica! Trying to imply it's anywhere near PE is like saying we're close to the Congo.....cos that's about 2200km north of us!! The ou's at the Geological society said it's nothing out the ordinary - it was only 5.0 on the Richter scale, and we apparently get around 10-20 jolts a year. Nevertheless, some peeps were hoping we'd get a wave out of it. But you have to remember - you don't want to be trying to ride a tsunami! You can't really surf a tsunami because it doesn’t actually have a face. A tsunami wave isn’t going to look anything like a 25-foot wave at Jaws, Waimea or Maverick's! It’s more likely to look like a wall of whitewater approaching land. It’s not often it’ll stack up cleanly into a breaking wave; as only a portion of the wave is able to stack up tall anyway. This is cos the wave is often over 50km’s long and the tail end of the wave is still travelling at 200km/h! So what happens is that the shore end of the wave becomes extremely thick, forcing this wall of water to run far inland – not exactly where you’d want to be going with your board! Let’s face it; we know how little control we have over our boards in the whitewater. On a tsunami, there's no face, so there's nothing for a surfboard to grip. Plus the fact that generally the waters full of debris dredged up from the sea floor, makes for a less than ideal ride! This is not what you want to be caught paddling around in! You can't duck-dive the thing either cos the entire water column is in motion, not just the top few feet. You also can't bail, cos the trough behind might be another 25km away, and all that water is moving towards you. So, don’t plan on riding too many earthquake generated waves – they aren’t all they’re cracked up to be! Best place to be if we get one coming our way is to be nowhere near the beach! When I worked with Surfline in creating their Pipe Surf report, we ended up having to link in to a private weather station out in Lovemore Heights, cos for some strange reason the data feed from the PE airport wasn't in the format that Surfline could import.
This meant that the winds on the surf report were sometimes a bit out, as what happens that end of PE can be different to what's going on at the beach. Lucky for us, a new weather station at NMMU has just come on line, so the kind peeps at Surfline have updated the surf report so that it pulls data from here instead. Which is great, cos now it means the winds you see on the Pipe Surf Report should be pretty much spot on accurate as to what's happening at Pipe right then, when you look at the report. Remember, the Pipe report is updated automatically during the day to incorporate Surfline's predicted swell for that time of the day (and they're pretty flipping accurate), and the live weather from the NMMU station. So what you see on the report is actually what should be happening at Pipe right then. Nice to check back during the day to see how conditions are changing, or if you're wanting to keep an eye on the wind to see when the west pulls through. Winds are updated every 30min or so. So there you have it peeps, go check out the new and improved Pipe Surf Report under the Forecasts tab on the main menu. Now if only it wouldn't say stuff like 0-1ft (like it does today), then we'd all be a lot happier.... You're not going to like this peeps, but all indications are that beasterly easterlies and colder waters are here to stay. Chatted to a mate this morning who's a professor in Ichthyology at Rhodes (that's the science of fish), who also does research on the ocean currents around SA and Africa.
Turns out that the Aghulus current, which runs down eastern Africa and past us here in PE, has warmed up considerably over the past decade. This has resulted in the current picking up speed. The faster flow has created greater friction as it brushes past the continental shelf, and this is causing an upwelling of cold water which is flowing inshore. The researchers reckon that the waters between Port Alfred and Plett will become permanently colder as a result of the current flow changes. So off to buy those 4/3's and booties. Seeing as I already surf in those, I might have to invest in one of those heated vest things that Mush swears by! Okay, now onto the bad news about the winds. Appears as if the easterlies are going to become an even more frequent occurrence. Due to climate change, things are hotting up - which sees the interior of the country becoming warmer than normal. This heating causes a stronger high pressure over the Free State, which tends to push the cold fronts further offshore - keeping the wests and the waves away from PE. So there you have the "good" news - our water's getting colder, and the easts are going to become the norm not the exception. How's THAT for sucking coconuts.... The challenge is on to find a decent wave along our coastline that's offshore in an east! Jeepers, this easterly is doing my head in. I'm so over summer, and we aren't even halfway through it yet. Had a look through the stats on Wind Guru, which showed we only had 6 days of west in December. In other words, 84% of the time it blew east.
Looking back to December 2009 and 2008, they had 11 and 9 days of west respectively. So by all accounts we're quite entitled to be gatvol of the east these holidays, it HAS been worse than usual. Add freezing water and hardly any swell to the mix, and you have a potent combination to create widespread misery amongst the local surfing population! At last a brief respite is on the cards, with a west coming through from Saturday through to Monday. There's even a bit of groundswell predicted for Tuesday next week, but unfortunately it coincides with the return of the easts. Bogger. The holiday makers are pulling out of SF in droves - even non-surfers hate the persistent easts! The irony of it is that Joeys weather is perfect this time of year....all they need is a sea though. Just wish that wavepools were more economically viable, we could sure do with one. I've surfed the one up at Sun City. Once you get over the fact that chlorinated water doesn't float you as much, and that wiping out on concrete isn't that comfortable - all's good. You can sit in exactly the same spot, and every 4 minutes to the second a roar emanates from behind the wall and out rolls a decent sized wave. Nothing wrong with artificial perfection! It's also a trip walking through the casino carrying your board and have everyone looking at you like you're bonkers! Highly recommended..... |
AuthorMillerslocal Archives
July 2021
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