Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Friday 4th  October)

Best Days: Sun, Mon, Tues: strong series of south swells with good winds early.

Recap: Thursday and Friday delivered another two days - making three consecutive, in total - of unexpected southerly swell across Southern NSW. Wave heights held in around the 3ft mark and conditions have been clean with light winds. Without going into much detail (as I’m going to spend some time over the weekend and early next week undertaking a comprehensive hindcast of this event), it appears that this series of south swells was sourced from an extremely remote and unusual part of our southern swell window. More on that early next week. 

This weekend (Nov 5th - 6th)

We’ve got a strong southerly swell due this weekend, originating from a vigorous front entering the lower Tasman Sea on Saturday morning.

However, the timing is such that most of Saturday will see small leftovers from today (inconsistent 1-2ft south facing beaches, smaller elsewhere). The leading edge of this new swell should start to show across the South Coast during the middle of the afternoon, and may just reach the Sydney region very late in the day (slightly higher chance for the Illawarra coast, slightly lower chance for the Hunter coast). 

Early NW winds will precede a brief S/SW change before lunch but winds should ease right back from the south into the afternoon. So conditions will be reasonably good throughout the latter part of the day however it’s hard to gauge how much size we’ll see - the most likely outcome is that Sydney’s south facing beaches will see late 2ft+ sets in the few hours before dark, but much more size is possible across the South Coast due to the swell reaching here earlier. 

Sunday is therefore shaping up to deliver strong southerly swells, with south facing beaches seeing 4-5ft sets and the Hunter pulling in 6ft+ bombs. Conditions will be excellent with early light winds and afternoon sea breezes, however beaches not directly open to the south will be much smaller. 

Next week (Nov 7th onwards)

The parent low to Saturday’s front will stall S/SE of Tasmania on Saturday, slingshotting a series of fronts through Bass Strait into Sunday (all contributing fresh south swell to our region) whilst also generating a secondary south swell off a S/SW fetch across its western flank.

This is expected to supply plenty of south swell across Southern NSW on Monday, probably of a similar size to Sunday however a little more consistency is expected as there’ll be two or three swell trains running concurrently. This may also create the odd bigger set at swell magnets.

Early morning winds should be very favourable, light out of the NW however they’ll freshen from the N and then NE during the day so make the most of the morning session.

These southerly swells will then rapidly abate through Tuesday with freshening northerly winds ahead of a late southerly change across the South Coast. A small NE windswell is also possible across exposed NE facing beaches on Tuesday (from Monday’s freshening winds) however I’m doubtful we’ll see much size. 

It looks like we’ll see a wind change across the Sydney region overnight Tuesday though no great strength is expected, and by Wednesday morning we’ll be back around to a light offshore breeze. Model guidance has a small S’ly swell trailing the overnight change though I think it’s overstating surf size at the moment, I’m not confident that there’ll be any major energy in the water on Wednesday. However south facing beaches should have some small weak waves in the 2ft range. 

Looking further ahead and there’s nothing of any significant standing out in the long term forecast period at this stage. 

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you Monday!