Look at that wind shear! No Tropical Surf!

We have a major El Niño event going on in the Pacific (read about it here). It will continue for the rest of the year. It will affect us. We will have extreme wind shear over what is normally considered the main development region for Tropical Systems in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. This area will be closed for business during the 2015 Hurricane Season. On that note, it’s good for PR in that we almost certainly will not be hit by a major storm this season. Also, any storms that may form should get their strength in latitudes above our island, another plus. If they can travel far enough west we can get some swell from the higher latitude storms. That’s looking on the bright side. On the down side, there is most likely going to be no signifcant tropical development this season. The odds are not in our favor. I hope we get some sneaker storms in September at least. We’ll have to see.

So what do we have to look forward to?

The wind flows should be conducive to summer time surf at the summer time spots on the island. Rincon will be flat A LOT but several other nooks and crannies of the island that can take advantage of long Easterly fetch should have waves on tap for several days of each smouldering hot month of summer. Some of these breaks are on the northern coast of the island, some are on the east coast, some are in the southeast. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific on their locations, but I’ll at least try to post pictures of what I find in my summertime wave searches around the island.

Windy conditions and background swell on the way.

Tomorrow and Thursday will feature calm winds and small to flat conditions due to some leftover background swell in the ocean. It will be more of a surf lesson wave at the most exposed breaks. The north side of the island could see some decent surf with calm winds in the morning. Friday is when the wind will crank out of the ENE to NE and it won’t stop through the remainder of the forecast period. Some groundswell might punch through, but it will be battered down a lot from all that wind pointing away from Rincon. The conditions should be super glassy at the tucked away spots, but whatever swell makes it through will not be too big. We should at least see some waist to chest high surf starting Friday though. The surf should stay in that range through to the middle of next week.

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).