During my lunch break at work today I was checking and re-checking the forecasts for MD and DE for Sunday and plotting out the best spot to paddle out and I thought, "It'd be great to have a database of past swell/wind directions that I could reference to see what the conditions were like on the days I had lots of fun (or didn't) at certain spots." SwellInfo, have you ever considered keeping some sort of a record of this stuff OR does it already exist and I'm way out of the loop for not already knowing this info? Is there some sort of historical database of buoy info? From here forward I'm definitely going to keep a little moleskin notebook in my wagon to jot down this sort of stuff after a session so I can have a personal record of everything, but I think it'd be pretty cool to have something to reference on the computer, as well. On one hand it seems like a bad idea because people could sort of "crack the code" and never have to get to the beach to know what it'd be like given certain conditions, but if somebody is that uncommitted and lazy about surfing, they probably wouldn't do the work to figure it all out anyway... What's everybody think? Do you keep a log of this sort of info?
COOL! This will be super helpful. I live in Baltimore and am a ridiculously overcommitted teacher and musician and can usually only make it to the beach for a couple of days/month. I'd definitely be willing to do some number crunching and cross-referencing data to make up for my lack of actual surf time.
wind/swell direction Thats a great idea usually its up to us to reference our journals, but if we could reference past swell directions and wind directions we could cross reference our journals and dial in our plan of attack. The forcasting here on the eastside seems to be a little tricky factoring in the short range and short fetch of the storms producing the swells. Considering all this I think swellinfo guy is doing pretty good. But we don't really have any choice anyways besides everyone needs their balls busted keeps things even.
i know the whole magicseaweed vs swellinfo debate can get heated lol but on magicseaweed there is a "historical forcast" button, you can put in any date and get the forcast from that day
When I get home from a session (or before I go), I hover over the timeline graph and take a few screen grabs of the hours I was out.
Each buoy has a historical database that you can access. It contains tons of data especially if it is a buoy with swell direction data.
thats funny... I actually started to take a log every day of this sites data. I got lazy and stopped after a month but one thing that I was doing and I think it would be really cool for you to do is comparing the 7 day out forcast to what it actually was that day. That would give us an idea of how accurate a 7 day forecast is.
