Dave Vlug taps the ceiling in
the middle of Sydney, with
not a soul around. Waves
like these exist and sessions
like these go down with
great frequency as the front
edge of new swells enter
our shores. Learn to read
synoptic charts, follow their
trends and predict a new
swell’s arrival and you too
can be like Vluggy here.
PHOTO: ORNATIOne of the best examples of the spaces
in between comes every summer on
the east coast of Australia; especially
on the coastline north from Seal Rocks
to the Sunshine Coast. Slow-moving
highs can become semi-stationary
centred over New Zealand, and these
highs can develop broad swathes of
easterly to south-easterly tradewind
fetches over the corridor between the
North Island and the island chains of
Vanuatu and New Caledonia and into
the Coral Sea.
Sometimes low-pressure systems
can form and drift down into these
tradewind fetches; sometimes even
tropical cyclones can interact with
these wind fields (and that’s when
the internet hype game gets ramped
up massively). But these tradewindbands themselves can supply weeks
and weeks of low hype surf to the east
coast, courtesy of a magic phenomenon
called the fully developed sea state.
This fully developed sea state is a
physical reality known by sailors, sea
dogs and old-school surf forecasters
that rarely, if ever, gets translated into
internet swell models. It boils down
to a simple maxim: a fully developed