Windy wind chop with an extra side of wind.

The next several days will be dominated by non-stop ENE winds and tiny wrap-around wind chop for Rincon. I imagine the north side of the island will be a huge terrible mess over the next few days probably seeing 2-4ft overhead size with extreme blown-out conditions. The right morning might have some just regular chop to semi-chop at times, but by the afternoon it will be VAS conditions.

Now back to Rincon. We will have perfect surf lesson conditions for almost all of January. My January outlook is taking a terrible turn for the worse. We have one shot at some “good” days in Rincon during the month of January. That opportunity will come right smack dab in the middle of the month with the opportunity of getting some long period NE swell. Otherwise wind-fest will continue and all storms will pull off the states only to push massive swells at Europe. They will get nonstop surf over there. Every single storm is going to blow up and push all of it’s energy right at Europe. Rincon will only have the hope of NE backlash. I hope February has more opportunities for swell. I remember when we used to get at least one swell event a week this time of your (sometimes two). I miss those days. Looks like we’re down to one swell event per month (sometimes two).

Rincon kind of got skunked on the Hurricane Edouward Swell

It looked like the swell would be strong enough to push into Rincon, but the path of the storm just didn’t cooperate enough to give Rincon the reach-around. The swell wrapped around as best it could but that still just left us with surf lesson waves in Rincon. The North side of the island got pretty decent and there was quite a few fun sessions to be had, but the crowds were super heavy. The swell in reality didn’t have nearly as much of a NE angle as all the models were predicting. In the ocean it was mainly East swell. Unfortunately, the forecast is looking grim again.

Rincon: We stay small to flat for the foreseeable future. Some background pulses might show up over the weekend off and on with the tides, but don’t expect much.

Isabela/Aguadilla: Smaller leftovers starting tomorrow with a big drop in size by Friday. Some waist to chest high wind chop should be on hand over the next week or so though.

Wind Shear and Dry Air Keeping the Tropics on Lockdown

We have some tropical disturbances, but they will have a hard time making it into our swell generation zone. Several of the key hotspots for Tropical development are seeing 40 knots of wind shear as you can see in the image above. No swell making tropical system can form in that kind of wind shear. When this happens, storms that do manage to form once steered into some nook that allows a miracle to happen never get a symmetrical wind-field which means no swell for us. The movement of the pressure/open wave can give the North side of the island some waves, but here in Rincon we stay flat. That being said. Isabela might see some waves in two or three days. This month I will be making several posts simply explaining why we will be flat for so long. I’m not looking forward to it.

Short Version:

We will stay flat for a long time. Isabela will have some wind chop over the weekend in the waist to chest high range.