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HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Pacific Ocean lights up for last half of December
If you're a surfer living anywhere near pretty much any coast in the United States, chances are you've had a holiday season to remember -- and it's not even New Year's yet. The West Coast and Hawaii have been going looney tunes since a couple days before Christmas. (East Coast/PR surfers -- we see you grinning over there, too. Stay tuned for your feature later this week.)
And while we are in an El Nino year, this latest obscene run of surf has little to do with "the Child." As Sean Collins explained in our Year in Review feature: "I'd say that so far, we haven't really experienced a significant El Nino effect on our surf in the North Pacific. Most of our run of surf has come from a good storm track sucking up tropical moisture in the Western Pacific and weak blocking high pressure in the North Pacific. But a good analogy of the North Pacific right now is like a small brush fire that is slowly burning and spreading through a field and there are a bunch of gas cans scattered around. Right now, the moderate El Nino condition in the North Pacific is similar to that brush fire in the field that's poised to blow up at any moment once those gas cans catch fire and do some serious big storm/swell damage. Stay tuned for January and February."
We asked Surfline forecaster Dave Sellin specifically about our recent holiday gifts. "As these low pressure systems moved off of Japan in mid-December with 30- to -40-foot-plus seas, they sent classic NW groundswells for the Hawaiian Islands over Christmas Day and beyond. Not to be outdone, California got in on the action as these same storms marched into the Central North Pacific and delivered solid WNW swell for the entire state. The storms had large fetches, and they dropped well enough to the south -- meaning many west-facing nooks and crannies throughout California saw good, sizeable surf."
We're not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, as it were, but stay tuned to the Surfline forecasts as we head into the New Year. Looks like more presents brewing up in the Pacific.
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December 29, 2009
