West Wittering Surf Forecast and Surf Report

Alright, let’s get into it. This is a tough one for West Wittering. Straight up, the 16-day window hasn’t got a single recommendation I can get excited about. The whole forecast period is basically a write-off for any kind of decent surf. We’re looking at a long, flat spell with only tiny, weak pulses that never line up with decent wind.

We kick off on Friday the 4th of September, and it’s already a mess. A 4ft SW swell is there, but the WSW wind is howling at 25 mph, making it cross-on and totally jumbled. The combined energy is weak at 131, and the water temp is a wild 69°, which is much warmer than normal for this time of year.

That afternoon, the swell drops to 2ft. The wind stays strong and cross-on. It’s no good. Saturday the 5th is even smaller, with a tiny 0.7ft on the morning and a slight offshore wind in the afternoon, but it’s just not enough to break over. The rest of the first week and into the second is the same story: tiny waves from 0.3ft to 3ft, constantly getting chopped up by onshore or cross-onshore winds. The swell periods are all over the shop, mostly short, so there’s no real push.

We go through a huge gap of nothing. Days and days of poor surf conditions. The morning of Saturday the 12th of September finally shows a clean cross-offshore wind from the N at 9 mph, but the swell is only 0.3ft. It’s clean as a whistle, but there’s nothing to ride. The same happens on Sunday the 13th and Monday the 14th – clean, glassy conditions with light offshore winds, but the swell is virtually non-existent.

Finally, on the morning of Thursday the 17th of September, we get a bit of a pulse. A 1ft SSW swell with a fresh N wind giving us a clean cross-offshore. The energy is a meagre 21. Then on the afternoon of the 17th and into Friday the 18th, it gets a little better. We see a 2ft to 2ft SW swell combined with a fresh offshore NNE to NE wind, giving us clean, peelable conditions. The energy is still low, around 12-22, but the wind is finally right. This is the best of a bad bunch. It’s small, beginner-friendly stuff, but it’s the only window where the conditions are even close to being surfable. The crowds at West Wittering are sometimes an issue, but with waves this tiny, it’s unlikely to be packed.

The setup, with the beach and groynes, really needs a proper swell to work. The long gap of flatness is pretty normal for the area, especially when the wind is so consistently poor. To be honest, the whole forecast looks more interesting for a kite surfer than a paddle surfer, as there’s plenty of wind but almost no wave energy.

Rusty.

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