Playa Poniente Surf Forecast and Surf Report

Alright folks, Rusty here. Let’s take a look at what’s on the cards for this stretch of coast. Gotta be straight with you: it’s a quiet run. We’re looking at Playa Poniente, and honestly, there’s not a single day in this whole 16-day span that offers anything worth paddling out for. The surf is tiny, weak, and the conditions just don’t line up. The combined wave energy barely tickles the meter, reading just 2 (weak energy) at the start on Friday morning, and it never really gets cooking. This is a stretch of beach and reef, exposed to the swell, but that doesn’t matter much when the swell is flat.

The first few days from July 31st right through the first week of August are all the same story. You’ll see the swell height hovering between 0.7 ft to 2 ft, with periods mostly around 4 to 6 seconds – that’s short-period, weak, wind-driven junk. The wind does offer a few glassy moments, like on Sunday morning the 2nd of August, and then again on Monday the 3rd and Tuesday the 4th, but even then, the wave energy is negligible – that Tuesday morning only has a combined energy of 12 (still weak). It’s just not enough to push you around.

Things look a little better on Monday the 4th of August afternoon, where the swell bumps up to 2 ft from the south with a period of 6 seconds and combined energy hits 26 (still in the weak category), but the wind goes onshore from the ESE at 6 mph, messing up whatever tiny bump there was. That kind of pattern repeats – a slight lift in energy, then onshore wind spoils it. By the second week, you’ve got a bit of a gap from around the 8th of August onwards where the energy stays low, most readings are single digits or low teens, with a couple of glassy mornings that are just flat. On the 13th of August, Thursday morning, there’s a small knee-high 2 ft from the ESE with a clean cross-off wind, but the energy is still only 13 (weak). The wind that afternoon turns into a moderate cross-shore, which is messy.

The only little standout in this whole outlook is that Thursday morning the 13th of August. The swell is small, the period is short, but it is clean with that cross-off breeze. That’s about as good as it gets, and it’s not saying much. There are no big swells, no long-period groundswells, and nothing for experts or even beginners beyond a few ankle-biters.

For a beach-and-reef setup like this, with these tiny waves and persistent onshore winds, this looks more like a kite-surfing kind of stretch than a paddle-surfing one, if you’re into that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s a good time to clean the wax off your board and wait.

Rusty.

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