Croatan Surf Forecast and Surf Report

Alright, let's talk in feet and miles per hour for the rest of you.

Lookin' at the charts for the next couple of weeks, and gotta be straight with you – it’s a pretty quiet stretch ahead for the Croatan area. The overall pattern is small, with a few windows where it might be just worth paddling out, but there's nothing to get too excited about for a while.

We start off with a bit of a gap. Honestly, the first few days are a write-off. Saturday (August 1st) and Sunday (August 2nd) are just poor, with messy, weak wind-swell and cross/on-shore winds. Not worth your time. The first real sniff of anything surfable comes on Monday morning, August 3rd. We’ve got a modest bump in energy, with the combined energy of all swells directed here hitting 535, and chest-high waves around 5 ft coming from the SSE. The wind is cross-off, keeping it clean, but with a period of only 8 seconds, it’s a bit of a short-period wind swell. It’s marginal, but it’s the best we’ve got early on. The water is sitting at 77°, which is a touch cooler than average for this time of year, but nothing wild.

The real standout, and the only time I’d get a little excited, is Tuesday morning, August 4th. The wind drops to glassy – a light 3 mph from the SW. That’s a major positive. The swell fades a bit to a knee-high 3 ft from the SE, combining to a weak energy of 73, but the glassy conditions will make it look a thousand times better than the size suggests. For a beginner spot like Croatan, that’s pretty much ideal. The wave comment says "surfable waves but very ordinary conditions," and with glass, it’ll be a fun little session for the learner crew. Crowds are often here, so expect some company, but on a Tuesday morning, you might be alright.

After that, it’s a long, slow fade. From Wednesday morning (August 5th) all the way through to Sunday, August 16th, the swell is tiny, mostly below 2 ft, and the energy is consistently weak (two-digit numbers). There are a few mornings with clean, cross-off winds, like August 7th, 8th, and 9th, but the waves are just too small to really ride. The wave state is clean, but there’s nothing to push you down the line. A couple of afternoons even show a glassy period on the 16th with 0.3 ft swell and no wind, which is beautiful to look at but flat as a pancake.

So, to wrap it up: Monday the 3rd is your best bet for actual size, but Tuesday the 4th morning with the glassy wind is the true quality window for a clean, tiny wave. Everything else is a long, flat spell. It’s one of those times where the forecast is optimistic for a change, but for now, this is what we’ve got.

Rusty

Read more