Small open beaches late in the week

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Ben Matson (thermalben)

Victorian Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 2nd February)

Best Days: Thurs/Fri: small waves east of Melbourne. Weekend: should be a good window of waves, most likely east of Melbourne (too small for the Surf Coast). Early next week: slightly better groundswell on the way.

Recap: Small waves and onshore winds. A terrible weekend of surf. 

This week (Feb 3 - 6)

Poor surf will continue through Tuesday with fresh southerly winds set to continue about the coast. 

In fact a small low is expected to form across southern Bass Strait (off the North Coast of Tasmania) which will anchor the southerly fetch in place for a period of time, so we could see a reasonable local swell but with these winds it’s not worth worrying about (there probably won’t be quite enough size for protected spots east or west of Melbourne).

On Wednesday, we’re likely to see a wind shift to the east at some point, as a high pressure system in the Bight starts to move eastward below Tasmania. However, there’s only low confidence on exactly when this will occur.

With fresh southerly winds likely ahead of this wind shift, surface conditions will probably take some time to improve unless we see the easterly kick in before lunch (which is less likely than an afternoon shift).

Therefore, Thursday is probably your best chance at a surf this week, with moderate to fresh E/SE winds likely to open up some of the open beaches east of Melbourne (mainly the southern ends of the Mornington Peninsula and Phillip Island). 

As for swell, we’ll see a late kick on Wednesday originating from a front tracking through the eastern periphery of our swell window on Tuesday. This system will mainly be focused through the southern Tasman Sea so we’ll experience only a brief round of sideband energy in Victoria but it should be just enough for a few sneaky 3-4ft waves at exposed beaches east of Melbourne during Thursday (biggest in the morning). Keep your expectations low (and don't anticipate much more than a small sloppy mess in Torquay).

Thursday’s swell will then fade through Friday and winds should veer more E’ly through E/NE, so the open beaches east of Melbourne should be nice and clean. However, surf size will be very small by this time so make sure you’ve got an appropriate grovel board on hand.

This weekend (Feb 7 - 9)

Looks like we’ll see a window of opportunity between migrating high pressure systems this weekend, which should allow for a period of light winds before the next onslaught of sou’easters set up camp across the Victorian coastline.

As for swell, we’re not expecting much. Keen swell chart watchers will notice the period charts lighting up late Friday, suggesting a new long period swell - however this energy will be quite small in size and won’t translate to much at the coast. The reason these periods are showing so strongly is that there is simply no other swells in the water to overshadow them. 

They will originate from a complex merger of several weather systems in the Southern Indian Ocean over the next few days - being Severe Tropical Cyclone Eunice, Tropical Storm Diamondra, and also a strong polar low at similar longitudes (which will essentially sweep up the two tropical systems into the low latitude westerly flow).

Of all of these systems, the polar low will probably be the best formed within our swell window (see chart below), but this will be SW of West Oz and consequently a very large distance from the Victorian coast.

So right now expectations are for inconsistent 3-4ft sets across the open beaches east of Melbourne, and 1ft to maybe 2ft on the Surf Coast (building Saturday, holding Sunday). They key will be just when the next high ridges in from the west, bringing about the next round of SE winds. I’ll have more details on this in Wednesday’s update. 

Next week (Feb 10 onwards)

A stronger frontal progression behind the triple merger (mentioned above) during the second half of this week looks like generating a slightly better swell for the Victorian coast early next week. It doesn’t look like it’ll be very big but should be just enough to get the Surf Coast working a little better than recent weeeks (local winds pending, of course).