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COME ON IRENE
Hurricane Irene brings playful surf to the Northeast
PREVIOUS HURRICANE COVERAGE:
Irene Lights up North Carolina: Full story and photos; and video, too.
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As well as spending a few days meandering around the Mid-Atlantic, giving the Outer Banks and Florida a few solid days of waves, Irene, being the kind and gentle storm she was, sent some fine surf to the Northeast too.
"It was a pulsey sort of swell, especially up in the Northeast," Mike Watson, Surfline's East Coast forecaster explains. "It wasn't pumping the whole time, but there were really good windows."
As the season's ninth named storm, Irene had a near perfect track for east coast surfers, as she just did a littl jog towards the Northeast and is now accelerating out to sea. "That's excatly the kind of movement we want," continues Watson. "Plenty of swell, moving reasonably slowly and no one gets hurt. If it was a Cat 3 or 4, it would've been epic."
Longtime northeast surfer, photographer, writer, webmaster and surf school instructor Christian del Rosario was pretty stoked nonetheless:
When Tropical Storm Irene swell first rolled into on Wednesday night, I was excited about the prospect of having a few days off from teaching surfing; I figured it was time to try to get some half-decent photos for my website, www.nesUrfari.com -- and I may as well catch some good waves while I was at it.
The surf was super fun on Thursday but then it dropped on both Friday and Saturday, so it was back to teaching surf school for those two days. When I returned home from work Saturday afternoon the swell was on the rise again and the forecast looked solid enough for me to start making some calls.
I called my old surf buddy John Carden up in Hampton, New Hampshire who I had been in touch with for the last year, trying to get him down here, but probably haven't surfed with in well over ten years. I told him to get here ASAP, it was going to be good and they were going to get skunked up there.
I asked Johnny Boy to go round to 2SI Surfboards and see owner Shane Smith to pick up a few boards that were bound for the Island. Out of the four boards that needed delivery, Johnny could only bring Raymond Paula's brand new 6-footer because that was all that would fit in his bag.
Johnny Boy made it the next day and as soon as I got him from the ferry to the beach he was into some decent chunky chest to head high swell courtesy of Irene. As I handed Raymond his new board Shane called and said the other three boards would be down on the first boat, "special delivery", as he and his buddy Jon Gozzo would be down to hand deliver the goods via the 6:30am ferry.
As I watched the boat unload I was getting antsy watching an endless stream of surfboards come out of the luggage hold. Besides the guys I was waiting for there were a lot of familiar faces coming down the ramp amid the usual sea of contractors getting to the Island to start off the work day. Half of the Cape Cod surf crew came over. Turns out that the two-man NH delivery team morphed into three, as 2SI team rider Casey Lockwood decided that the older guys needed supervision.
My now four-man crew of Hampton surfers was chomping at the bit to get into some surf and since it was stomach to chest high with the odd shoulder high set and offshore, it was hard to get them to slow down to save some energy for the afternoon session. The swell was actually smaller than the night before but that didn't seem to bother the local crew and the visiting Cape and Hampton contingents.
I knew the swell was going to fill in during the afternoon so even though it was overcast I took out the gear and shot some photos, I was going to save my energy. We ended up surfing until noon and then left the beach for lunch/rest. As we drove away a solid overhead set came as a harbinger of things to come for the afternoon -- after lunch was an Irene dream come true for
every surfer on the Faraway Isle. But the photos already told you that.
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Speaking of photos, special thanks go out to Christian del Rosario and Joe McGovern for their outstanding images.
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RELATED LINKS:
Surfline's Northeast Surf Forecast
LOLA for the Northeast
Hurricanetrak
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Surfline
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