This is the same storm that brought all the snow to the NE on the weekend of Dec 19/20.
After raining and blowing up to 55 out of the SE on Friday night you can see the weekend started out with pretty stormy surf on Saturday morning, unlike everywhere else on the east coast the weather was actually pretty nice for about an hour.
The surf was a mess but it was light wind and sunny skies. About mid morning it started blowing offshore and by 11 it was really starting to kick in out of the NW at about 25-35 with higher gusts. Sound tide got on the road in Avon again and they close the road at S-Curves also. A couple of people paddled out but it was too much wind and swell still. We watched for a while and a few short shoulders were caught and that was about it. The swell dropped a bit and it became more manageable but there were very few rides. Occasionally a good one was had. I watched someone try to paddle into one and their board got ripped out of their hands by the wind and was spinning in the air like a top.
A very peaky shifty swell from several directions. Someone brought out some jet skis and they did some tow ins allowing people to get into the wave early enough to get behind the peak for a barrel which was pretty impressive to see. Jeff and I paddled out between the jetties, the wind was slightly more manageable there and it wasn’t breaking out quite so far. It wasn’t as big as behind the motels but we were able to get more rides. We were amazed when getting in the water as it easily had to be close to 70 degrees. Unheard of for Dec. and with the Air temps around 40 with a 25-40 mph wind it made it bearable as the wind just cut right through you. Swell came up pretty strong out of the north this am and the water temps plummeted overnight to the coldest of the season.
My guess would be about 52 degrees. What a temperature change in about 12 hours. Jeff said as he was going out of Hatteras inlet this am the water temp was 45 degrees. If you got lucky today there was a good one to be had but there was a mega current out of the north and a lot of close outs. There was a lot of denial paddle outs and most everyone lasted for just a few waves before getting tired of the battle. On Monday morning there was still a strong swell coming in out of the north and the water temps dropped even more hitting our first day in the upper 40′s. It might have been 50 but it was a cold 50 with the air temps only reaching a high of 42 with a cold NW wind still blowing. The tide was too high all morning making for strange conditions with the good wave if you got in the right place at the right time.
For about 45 minutes in the early afternoon at mid tide it was good , lining up nicely with a current you could almost keep up with. But then the tide dropped and the current increased rapidly and even though there was the occasional great wave it was really hard to find. As I’m finishing this up on Tuesday the swell is all but gone.
