Someone said there were "head high" sets in south jersey this past weekend. Can anyone on here vouch for that? I spent the last two days in Monmouth at some of the standout breaks, and I'm not believing that a south jersey sandbar was twice as big.
Sometimes I feel like surf stories are more exaggerated than fish stories.
3 ft swell with the right direction, wind and tide can easily be head high.
and if you were in montauk and catching the same swell it would have been a completely different swell direction and wind direction from south jersey
When you're 4'1", they're all head high.
saturday- knee high and clean
sunday- waist to stomach high and choppy, maybe a few chest sets
monday- chest high+ really early but it got smaller as the day went on
Best I saw was maybe a chest high set in MonCo (3 - 4 ft). It's all relative though. To some people their chest high is your head high. I have friends who are chargers and surf year round and will call what I consider chest high, head high. To me 2 - 3 is waist high, 3 - 4 chest high, 5 ft shoulder high, 6ft head high. I'm 5'9" for reference. On some swells at certain spots tide can make big difference in magnifying a chest high swell into a head high wave.
I would say 3 foot at 13 seconds would be head high +, not sure about 9 seconds. It's funny I just had this conversation with a friend. He was saying that it was shoulder to head high in New Jersey yesterday. I said I think your wrong and he sent a picture which looked a lot like what I was surfing in Maryland and I was calling it waist high. This is a copy of the email that I sent in reply to his picture:
The wave is measured not by the suck out section just as it stands up but by the size of the rippable wall out front. Even a knee high wave will stand up and be chest high when it first hits the sand bar. The problem is 10 feet down the line it is knee high again. The waves yesterday would jack up to be probably 6 feet high right as they broke but the majority of the ridable and rippable part of the wave was still only waist high at best. I dropped in on a wave and got barrelled without ducking more than my head. After that cover up the wave was waist high at best not 20 feet down the line from the barrel. That's why we call it waist high. You say east coast waves suck and are mostly under head high but you said yesterday was head high?
[QUOTE=surfdawave;132576]3 ft swell with the right direction, wind and tide can easily be head high.
Sure, if its 2 or 3 ft at 18 sec like a decent west coast swell.. but around here, you need a freakish wedge to call it legit head high on a 9 sec wave under 4 ft. And I'm not trying to compare south jerz to montauk or hatteras.
i'm calling it waist high on mid incoming monday in Belmar. no plus sign. I guess south jersey is just way bigger and better. everyone should probably go there to surf.
when you stare at flatness for 2 weeks, and then there is a 3ft real wave that shows up, someone is going to call it head high...
hey micah, are we getting another bermuda high set up? i saw some long period swell filtering on the long range forecasts...Originally Posted by Swellinfo
It doesn't look like it:
http://weather.unisys.com/gfsx/gfsx....nddiv=hide_bar
I know some summers, we had 1-3 ft' background swells for days long periods of time... Hopefully it sets up again.
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