No fireworks this weekend.
SURF:
Had a pretty good run there lately, didn't we? Sunny skies, warm water, and heaps of surf. Today we have dropping SSW swell for chest high+ surf, water temps in the low 70's, and overcast skies. For the weekend the swell drops unfortunately and the cloudy skies linger at the beach. Not much to celebrate it looks like. Did I already tell you though the water temps are in the low 70's? I guess we can strike up the band for that one. By Sunday the leftover SW groundswell/NW windswell will give us waist high waves.
FORECAST:
Not much to talk about next week either. We don't have any SW swells or real NW windswell on the charts. Maybe some knee SW/NW with waist high sets through the work week.
WEATHER:
Our heat waves are officially over. Weak low pressure is setting up shop on the west coast this weekend and into next week. What does that mean? Cooler than average temperatures for July and clouds lingering for most of the day at the beach. Should make seeing the fireworks in Del Mar a little tricky. Things should get back to normal around here by next weekend. Make sure to keep up to date on the weather this weekend at Twitter/North County Surf.
BEST BET:
Today as we still have rideable SSW swell. Next chance of good surf won't be until at least the 9th of July so split work early today! (If you haven't already).
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
I love spooky surf spots. Not to surf of course, just to talk about. Like Potato Patch and it’s swirling waters in front of San Francisco Bay. Or the ultra sharky Dungeons in South Africa. My favorite though: Our very own Cortes Bank 100 miles off southern California. But just what is Cortes Bank? Well if you’re not apt to go take a boat out there and do the research yourself, then just sit back in your comfy chair and let our friends at Wikipedia explain:
Cortes Bank is a shallow seamount (a barely submerged island) 111 miles west of San Diego. It is considered the outermost feature in California's Channel Islands chain. At various times during geologic history, the bank has been an island, depending on sea level rise and fall. The last time it was a substantial island was around 10,000 years ago during the last ice age. It is quite possible that this island was visited by the first human inhabitants of the Channel Islands, most notably San Clemente Island, whose seafaring residents would have been able to see "Cortes Island" from high elevations on clear days.
The shallower reaches of the bank comprise about 15–18 miles of sandstone and basalt and rise from the ocean floor just over a mile in depth. The shallowest peak, the Bishop Rock, rises to between 3 and 6 feet from the surface, depending on the tides. Other spots range in depth from 30 to 100 feet and are a hazard to shipping.
It has long been reported that the Cortes Bank was discovered in modern times by the captain of the side-wheel steamship Cortes, TP Cropper. In 1853, during a voyage from Panama to San Francisco, Cropper reported seeing the seas "in violent commotion" above an uncharted seamount that would eventually be named after the ship. Cropper at first thought he was above a volcano. However, it seems likely that the first modern sighting of the Bank was not by Cropper but by US Navy Lt. James Alden and Captain Jonathan "Mad Jack" Percival. This occurred on January 5, 1846. At that time, the frigate USS Constitution was passing well off the US West Coast from Monterey to see duty in the Mexican American War. The logbook of the Constitution from this day puts the ship in the vicinity of the bank and reads: “At 4-20 (p.m.) discovered breakers bearing N.E. about 10 miles distant. Alden would eventually become an officer with the United States Coast Survey, an organization charged with mapping the U.S. coastline. In the wake of the Cortes sighting, and because of his own earlier sighting, Alden dispatched the crew of the USS Ewing to discover the source of the open ocean breakers. Under Alden's orders, Lt. TH Stevens discovered and mapped the location and a rough outline of the Bank, which was for years incorrectly named "Cortez Bank." Stevens discovered waters around 54 feet deep, although he failed to discover the dangerously shallow area around the Bishop Rock, and it does not show up on the first Coast Survey map published in 1853.
Bishop Rock is today marked by a nearby warning buoy. It was named for the clipper ship Stillwell S. Bishop that reportedly struck the rock in 1855, then continued to San Francisco with a patched hull. Among other notable events in the history of the Cortes Bank is the fairly disastrous exploration of the Bank for treasure in 1957 by Mel Fisher. He was convinced that the wreckage of a Spanish Galleon lay on the seafloor off the Bishop Rock. The expedition found no treasure, but the ship carrying Fisher burned nearly to her waterline.
There have been at least two efforts to turn the Cortes Bank into an island nation. The most notable occurred in late 1966, when a team of entrepreneurs planned to turn the Cortes Bank into the constitutional monarchy of Abalonia. The general plan was to scuttle a WWII era concrete hulled freighter—probably the Tampa-built McClosky ship Richard Lewis Humphrey atop the Bishop Rock in very shallow water and surround the ship with an ever expanding ring of boulders so she could be used as a seafood processing factory. The group reasoned that international maritime law would allow them to become the rulers of their own nation because the Bank lay in international waters. The ship was instead destroyed atop the Bishop Rock by the same waves that are surfed today and her crew was nearly killed. The wreck of the Jalisco today lies beneath the surf zone in three pieces in 6 to 40 feet of water. When another company planned to form a nation called Taluga, the US government declared that the bank, as part of the continental shelf, was US territory. On 2 November 1985 the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65) struck the Cortes Bank reef about one mile east of Bishop Rock, putting a 60-foot gash in her outer hull on the port side, ripped-off her port keel, and severely deformed her outboard port propeller blades. She continued operations, then went into dry dock at Hunter's Point Shipyard for repairs.
In the summer of 1961, a surfer named Harrison Ealey of Oceanside, California became one of the very first people to surf a wave at the Bishop Rock. In around 1973, surfer Ilima Kalama, father of famed big wave surfer Dave Kalama, nearly lost his life when the abalone fishing boat SS Jalisco he was aboard sank on the Bishop Rock in the middle of the night.
In the early 1990s Larry Moore, photo editor at Surfing magazine, and Mike Castillo, veteran surfer and pilot, made flights out across the bank on rumors of giant waves. During a monster swell in 1990 they were astonished when they found empty waves breaking atop the bank in the 80 to 90 foot range. By 1995 Moore had seen and photographed waves and that year he led an expedition with a small group of surfers out there (including Surfing magazine editors Sam George and Bill Sharp) and pro surfer George Hulse. The team found relatively small but glassy waves in the fifteen foot range, and George Hulse was the first to catch one. "It was the only time I wrote out a will before a surf trip," Sharp said of the mission.
Several surfers planned for the ideal conditions at the bank. In 2001 a storm called "Storm 15" in the Gulf of Alaska and a high pressure ridge over California came together to create huge swells but light wind over the bank. A team of surfers went out on the F/V Pacific Quest from San Diego, with big-wave tow surfers Ken Collins, Peter Mel, Brad Gerlach and Mike Parsons, plus paddle-surfers Evan Slater and John Walla. On the morning of January 19th, 2001 they found smooth glassy conditions and enormous, half-mile long waves breaking across about 1 mile of reef. Walla and Slater tried to paddle for one of these waves and both nearly drowned. Parsons was towed into the wave of the day. His very first ride at the Cortes Bank was estimated at 66 feet. It won him the first of two Guinness World Records and the Swell XXL Biggest Wave Award (now Billabong XXL) prize of $66,000 for the biggest wave surfed in 2000/2001.
On January 5, 2008, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Grant "Twiggy" Baker and Greg Long returned to the location in the midst of one of the worst storms ever recorded off the coast of California. Mike Parsons was photographed on a wave bigger than his award-winning ride of 2001, judged by the Billabong XXL judges as 70+ feet on the face—later determined to be at least 77 feet—and Parsons second Guinness World Record. He was photographed 15 seconds into the ride indicating a wave of over 80 feet at the start of his famous ride. Very dangerous conditions made it difficult to photograph.
Although remote, the Cortes Bank draws crowds when conditions are good. On a trip with the Billabong Odyssey in January 2004 Sean Collins counted 10 or 12 boats with about 40 surfers. On that note, if you're looking for solid swell this weekend, I bet the open ocean swells breaking over Cortes this weekend will be at least 10' if you're up for it...
PIC OF THE WEEK:
Just opened my first surf resort in the Caribbean. Besides the fire coral, mosquitoes, sharks, and pirates, I think it will be a success.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Easy Like Sunday Morning
Been There Done That
Completed the Lemoore/Snowdonia/Myazaki/Typhoon Lagoon Slam
