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
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:
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...
It doesn't look like it: http://weather.unisys.com/gfsx/gfsx.php?inv=0&plot=hght®ion=us&t=9p&expanddiv=hide_bar I know some summers, we had 1-3 ft' background swells for days long periods of time... Hopefully it sets up again.
Awh sh!t dawg down here in NC it was head high all morning, but I'm 5'7" and was squatting or pig dogging below my waist line. So yeah head high, right?... Not. Still, I got barreled, had fun and surfed my brains out! Only at the peek of the set waves was it 3-4. Heck in Hawaii it would be like someone just flushed the toilet... Tiny.
Thanks all for the feedback guys. I realized that the dude who said it was head high has never surfed anywhere besides the mid atlantic. Check out the fiji pro at cloudbreak last month.. they (pro tour guys) were calling it 6-8 ft. So... head high on a three foot short period swell..? hell no. But it was super fun anyway and the water was crystal clear and so warm!
