This image shows only the swells directed at La Jaimacana (The Pipes) that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions over a normal northern hemisphere winter. It is based on 5048 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours represent increasing wave sizes. Very small swells of less than 0.5m (1.5 feet) high are shown in blue. Green and yellow represent increasing swell sizes and red represents largest swells greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs.

The diagram indicates that the most common swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was SSW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the ENE. 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 85% of the time, equivalent to 77 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal northern hemisphere winter but 5% of the time you can expect swell in the range 1.3-2m (4-6.5ft) 5%, equivalent to (5 days). Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with expected offshore winds, and given the fact that La Jaimacana (The Pipes) is exposed to open water swells, we think that that clean surf can be found at La Jaimacana (The Pipes) about 85% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 11% of the time. This is means that we expect 87 days with waves in a typical northern hemisphere winter, of which 77 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.