Caves Beach Swell Statistics, July: Surf with Light or Offshore Winds

This image shows only the swells directed at Caves Beach that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical July and is based upon 2480 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red represents the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell occurs.

The diagram implies that the dominant swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was ESE, whereas the the most common wind blows from the W. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 31% of the time, equivalent to 10 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal July but 6% of the time we expect swell in the range 2-3m (6.5-10ft) 6%, equivalent to (2 days). Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with predicted offshore winds, and given the fact that Caves Beach is exposed to open water swells, we calculate that clean surf can be found at Caves Beach about 31% of the time and that surf is spoilt by onshore wind 26% of the time. This is means that we expect 18 days with waves in a typical July, of which 10 days should be surfable.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.