It's great to have a forecasting model...and for my favorite break, swellinfo is always right on when calling for good surfing conditions. However, I live close enough to the beach (believe me, I know how fortunate I am in this) that I can go and check on waves when conditions are forecast to be mediocre, and oftentimes, I can find a really nice fun wave when the forecast is for ankle-high nothing. So, my question...could you brilliant folks at swellinfo, give us a vehicle to "pin" days when certain tide, swell, wind conditions warrant recording. That way, we could have a log of days when conditions provided good days to surf...and we could better forecast for ourselves days that are likely to be good even when models say otherwise. I tried doing this on an excel spreadsheet, but it's too cumbersome to record all the tide data with wind conditions and swell direction etc. Just a thought to make the site even more useful. BTW, the new way in which the swell data is presented, and then the tide below it...makes the best, most user-friendly forecasting site I have ever used, and I look at a bunch! Thanks for listening.
it really comes to local knowledge as far as tides, wind, etc. for individual specific breaks. As far as getting a history going, it comes down to needing data. We can use surf reporters data to give actual observations. This can easily broken down into a history of sorts. Of course, sometimes, we can undercall a swell. Remember, when you are wanting to know what are the swell heights "right now", its always good to validate with buoy observations. We are actually working on some really great improvements for our swell model for the nowcast (current day forecast).
Seems to me on your hard drive isnt the most useful place for this kind of info...I'm old school and keep my journal in a little hard bound surveyors field book..4" x 6" with maybe 100 lined pages. That way, its sitting in my glove box, at my fingertips while driving around looking. I also take it on trips to sketch out breaks i liked where i otherwise wouldn't rememeber the details. Its not high tech, but how cumbersome is it really to get home after a sesh and jot down, where you surfed, the swell height, period and direction, what tide it was, wind speed and direction and how those translated to actual conditions.
Yeah, I have a surf journal...and it is useful for this no doubt... I was using my GPS the other day and you can have it remember addresses...and I was thinking of something like that...where swellinfo users could have it under their profile...the days that they want to remember for whatever reasons (mine would be for the aforementioned good days when the forecast was otherwise)..you could just flag certain conditions, and then a tag it with a quick memo describing when it was best under those conditions. Then when those conditions are predicted for a given day, you';d have a "history" to check against. This may be less of an issue for some...but my particular favorite break can be really fun even when the predictions are for poor surf...and, I have a wife and kids..so anything that helps me get out quickly for a fun session is really helpful! I guess the bottom line is I want to be lazy, and let swellinfo help me out here...you all do a great job with the site!
