You win some, you lose some, you win some.
SURF:
Good to see some surf last weekend. And good to see some rain! Just not at the same time unfortunately. But I'll take any surf at this point. Which brings me to this weekend: It will be a slight repeat of last weekend. We've got a little bump from the surf and a weaker cold front. So expect suspect conditions and fun surf.
On Friday, we've got a new SW filling in for chest high sets in North County SD along with a weak cold front moving through. Winds will most likely be around 15 mph on Friday afternoon into Saturday.
We also have a steep NW filling in late Saturday into Sunday for chest high waves in SD with cleaner conditions. And here's the tides, sun, and water info:
- Sunrise and sunset:
- 6:18 AM sunrise
- 4:48 PM sunset
- FYI: This is pretty much the earliest the sun will set until December 20th, but... the mornings will be darker as the sunrise will inch towards 6:47 AM.
- Thanks to all the NW wind from the storms last weekend, water temps are 60!
- And the tides have a drastic 7' swing this weekend. Make sure to check out the lagoons and tide pools:
- 6' at sunrise
- -1' mid afternoon
- back up slightly to 1' at sunset
FORECAST:
The steep NW sticks around SD for Monday then we see a good NW arrive late next Wednesday into Thursday for shoulder high surf. We also get more late season SW arriving towards Thursday too. We should see some chest high sets from that. Along with the NW, should be good. We also have another weak cold front on the charts Wednesday/Thursday but it shouldn't screw up the surf that much. Make sure to check out Twitter/North County Surf if anything changes between now and then.
BEST BET:
Saturday morning if the wind isn't that bad for the SW. Or Sunday in SD with small but fun NW and cleaner conditions. Or if the cold front isn't that bad next week, then Wednesday/Thursday with shoulder high surf from NW/SW combo swell.
WEATHER:
Not a bad storm last weekend to start the fall season. Winds gusted to 47 mph in Solana Beach and the So-Cal mountains hit 74 mph- a category 1 hurricane! Most locations along the coast also received 1/2 to 3/4" of rain and we're just below average in our rain department. Could be worse. As mentioned above, look for a weak cold front Friday evening for cooler weather and breezy conditions. Temps may at best hith the low 60's. Sunday the sun returns and warmer weather prevails with temps near 70 and that lasts until Wednesday before another weak cold front moves through for breezy conditions again and temps in the mid-60's. Next weekend is forecasted to be sunny and warm with a potential Santa Ana event...
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
Are we just living with the fact that Great White sharks are now just part of our line ups along with shortboarders, longboarders, knee boarders, SUP's, bodyboarders, skimboarders, Beater Boards (TM), bodysurfers, kayakers, surf skis, Wavestormers (TM), inflatables, jet skis, and foilers? The answer is most likely yes: Researchers working in Southern California tagged 38 sharks this year, more than triple last year’s total. Here's Smithsonian Magazine to explain:
Researchers in Southern California are seeing more great white sharks than ever before, reports local broadcast network KCAL-TV. Chris Lowe, a shark expert at California State University Long Beach, tells KCAL-TV that his lab tagged a record 38 great whites—more than three times the number they tagged last year. “This year there were just more sharks around, and the question is why,” says Lowe.
But scientists emphasize an important qualifier: The great whites cruising the Southern California coast are babies and juveniles that tend to be between four and ten feet long. These skittish young sharks stick close to shore to avoid predators and snack on stingrays and fish. They also mostly avoid people, even as they’re becoming more numerous.
“Despite the fact that shark populations are going up and more people are using the water than ever before, we’re not really seeing more people actually being bitten by sharks,” Lowe tells Reuters. “In fact, in some years, the rate has gone down. So what that tells us, as a scientist, is that we’re not on their menu at all. But occasionally accidents happen.”
Previous research from Lowe’s lab identified Southern California spots—including Ventura, Oxnard, Santa Monica Bay, Huntington Beach and Dana Point—as nurseries for the famously toothy predators, reported Cheri Carlson of the Ventura County Star in 2017. Typically the immature great whites just spend the summer off Southern California, when the water is relatively warm, before heading south to Mexico and Baja as winter chills the sea. But this year Lowe says the sharks are sticking around.
“Normally they’d be leaving by now, but instead we are seeing more sharks than ever,” Lowe tells the Guardian's Katherine Gammon. Lowe tells Laylan Connelly of the San Jose Mercury News that his team doesn’t have enough data to draw any hard conclusions yet, but water temperature is part of what dictates whether the sharks stay or leave. “If our water temperature doesn’t cool down, the sharks that normally leave have no reason to leave. So we’re just going to wait and see,” Lowe says.
This year’s monitoring also revealed groups of young sharks spending time in places farther north, where the water was once too cold for them to linger. “To us, that’s a harbinger of climate change,” Lowe tells the Mercury News, “that’s a classic sign of species moving north and tracking conditions that are more suitable.”
But even as climate change shuffles the growing sharks’ favorite haunts, the population’s growing size is a good sign for the sharks and California’s marine ecosystems. More sightings mean that protections for great whites enacted by the state in 1994 have worked. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has also likely helped the sharks by protecting the favorite food of adults: marine mammals.
“It’s taken this long to finally start seeing the results of protection, [but] they’ve finally reached a tipping point,” Michael Domeier, a shark researcher at the Marine Conservation Science Institute, told Surfline's Dashel Pierson in 2017 following numerous sightings in Orange County. “This is not a fluke. It’s our new reality. And we just have to get used to it.” But a two-year drone study conducted by Lowe on the behavior of great whites near Southern California shores found they were mostly indifferent to people nearby. Lowe tells the Guardian that sharks may actually be making the beaches a bit safer by keeping the stingray population down.
So keep your feet up, no diving, no surfing in the dark, and make sure to surf with a buddy; which shouldn't be hard since there's no such thing as an empty line up in Southern California.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Scintillating
People On The Street Mistake Me For Zack From Saved By The Bell
Just Purchased Lowers. I Need Everyone Out Of The Water In 15 Minutes. Go on. Scat.
