head high.. BS

I hate to keep this going but I have to tell this story. I used to run a 1-900 surf report in northern NJ back in the late 80's early 90's. I paid local surfers from long branch down to Manasquan to call in reports to a central location. I would then collect these reports and "broadcast them on an itemized menu over the phone, for example : press 1 for Sandy Hook to Monmouth Beach - Press 2 for Monmouth beach to Allenhurst and so on. Even with these eys on "reporters it was almost impossible to get a reliable report. Either they would check at high tide and say it was flat and unridable or they would check at dead low and call it knee slop, even though with the tide filling in it would improve greatly. Anyhow it sucked and I was hemoraging $$ every week to pay these guys. I can't even imagine trying to predict what was coming a week out. The only reliable report is one you make with your own eyes. The best swell info can do is give you a general idea of what is coming, to really see what is out there you have to make the ride. If you live to far, take the report for what it is and do it or don't you can't blame the report. Out of everything I have ever seen on the internet swellinfo is the best by far, it's free, and it saves even me gas and I only live 5 minutes from the water. The combination of this site and the webcams takes 99% of the guess work out of making the trip or not.

 

below every swellinfo text forecast is the following:

**Surf Height Definition**
Forecasted surf heights represent a potential wave face height for the average to better breaks in a region during optimal conditions (tides,wind,swell).

The optimal conditions is the key here. During a days time, there is usually a tremendous amount of variability - both spatially and temporally.

Swellinfo gives forecasted heights for the morning and afternoon which are based off of predicted offshore swells. Tides, swell direction, period, wind, and bathymentry will create temporal and spatial variance for each local area. The greatest thing Swellinfo offers is the best raw data (swell plots) available for each local area produced from our wave model.

For those who like to complain, I urge you to become more familiar with looking at the raw data and understanding how the different variables influence your breaks.

But of course, we realize the vast majority, dont want to dig into the data, and we have designed swellinfo to try to best facilitate both needs. We have some ideas down the road to include more traditional types of paragraph style and video forecasting -> these are of course resource dependent (in other words, we could use more cash!).

 

hey zippy,

thats exactly how surfline got started in the 80's. Prob, the biggest difference, was they were located in southern california - bigger user base.

 

Def agree with you man, and that's why certain people who bash this site need to rethink why they are doing it and to realize how dumb they look as they're doing it.

 

That's what really sucked for me. At the time I was so outta touch with what was happening within mainstream surfing I thought I was the first. Then I found out that surfline existed for a couple years before me and I was bummed. I had lots of regular customers and even had a daily online report before the internet was huge. Even with them paying $1 per report I couldnt make ends meet. Not a very well thought out business model, I thought when I started " If I could get 10 percent of the surfers within NJ to call once a day I would make $500/day" problem was I doubt if I ever reached 10% and they didn't call every day...LOL! The best that I ever did was 50 - 100 callers a day and that was not near enough to pay the surf reporters and the service provider that held the 900 line. I plunged 10s of thousands in and never saw a dime . Live and learn.

 

good idea - hard to implement. it could have been zippyline.com rather than surfline.com!

I'm sure the biggest step for surfline (besides being out of socal) to get going was their early transition to go online, which is what likely made things happen for them. Its one of those things, where the early bird gets the worm, especially when it comes to the online presence, and they were way before the dot com boom even hit.

Swellinfo is attempting to catch em though!

 

This is funny, my wife just informed me that I ran that business from the mid 90's and ceased operations late 1999. I have started so many businesses in my life I lost track of the order . If Swellinfo keeps on this way it will surpass surfline, those surfline reports from the day it started from the pay per call line to the internet reports were and are the most inaccurate piles of you know what. This site is great and getting better all the time.