Wednesday, October 29, 2003
New Reports 
from Tuesday and Wednesday. Today's picture is of all the smoke that was hanging over us on Tuesday. Looked like a nuclear winter all day. A write-up at Billboard.com of the Pearl Jam concert last night which featured guests such as Jack Johnson and Chris Cornell, who made it a Temple of the Dog reunion for the first time in 11 years. The San Diego Union Tribune has a updated page with minute by minute fire status. If fantasy football is your bag, you may want to check out fantasy surfer.
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Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Title Image pic is from the 18th. New side image from James is from the same place, in January of 2002.
James is also selling two boards in the classifieds.
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Monday, October 27, 2003
New reports from a smoky Saturday and Sunday. Mavericks opening day was Sunday, October 19, and some pics from that day can be seen here.
LaBlogs has many links to firsthand accounts of the southlands fires. Just a few weeks ago was a story about the new exhibits that will be at the Reagan library, including the 80's eraAir Force One shown here being protected in unusual circumstances.
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Thursday, October 23, 2003
New reports from Wednesday and Thursday. Water quality continues to be good, only East Beach has a warning. The new pic up on the right is from James Fortman. The first in a series of photos to be posted on SBS, this is from Campus Point the winter of 1995. All the sidebar pics are clickable now to open up higher quality images.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Swell #4 of the fall came in for the weekend, bringing 3 days of waves. This swell was smaller in my opinion then the last two swells, but it was a long lasting swell. Some wacky high tides during daylight hours made spot selection critical and I must say, I failed in my choices there. Two sessions on Saturday, 2 on Sunday and One on Monday can all be found in the October Reports.
4 new pics by pope. The Title Image a SBHS grom perhaps getting Pitted. The top one on the right was a WWII era plane flying close to the deck on Saturday. In the third, a skimboard may have been the best tool of choice to deal with the raging high tide shorepound at some local beachbreaks. The 4th is of the sign proclaiming PJ at the bowl. Stay tuned here at SBS for the surf forecast for the PJ concert.
It appears the Alaskan Pipeline that has brought us many solid days this October will be slowing down soon since a high pressure may soon camp out up there. However, we can turn our attention briefly back down south as Hurricane Patricia is blowing 65knt winds down off of mainland Mexico. She is predicted to continue to build, up to 90knt winds, but well out of our swell window.
For those of you with money burning holes in your pocket I have a few consumption ideas for you.
The first is a beach cruiser I bought off of Stephan, who runs Kick Ass Cruisers. This chaotic, often bewildering site is best used simply to find the phone number to ask Stephan to build you a cruiser for $85.
The other recommendation is the San Rafael Wilderness Map. I had posted the link to it before but recently pulled the trigger and bought one of these for $8.60 delivered. It is of such quality and detail that I can't stop talking about it.
Tom has a pic of his board for sale.
Stay tune here for some reader submitted pics coming in the next few days....
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Thursday, October 16, 2003
Another swell rolled in and brought great waves Monday morning and quickly left. The title image and the new one on the right are from Monday at lunchtime at Sands. Some other new reports from the weekend can be found for the 10th, 11th, and 12th.
Goleta and Santa Barbara's High School Football teams face their first league games this Friday. Dos Pueblos will be taking on the Dons this Friday at 7:30pm at Santa Barbara High, and San Marcos will be heading down to play Ventura High. Head on over to SBHS for a some good ole' football.
Tom is selling his 7'0" McCrystal and a real cheap wetsuit in the Classifieds.
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Friday, October 10, 2003
Over-Analysis of Incoming Swell #2.
I noticed on Wednesday that the Washington Buoy was at 38ft. SE Papa was also around 25 feet. I didn't think any of that was coming down here, but then between noon and 6pm the California Buoy doubled in size. I did some math and figured something might show on the Harvest buoy around 2 or 3pm on Thursday. Thursday am came around and Harvest was not showing much, although friends were calling in about fun sessions anyway. I watched the buoys and right around 4pm Harvest started going off. It's max significant wave height had been 9 feet for days and now in a few hours it was at 15 feet. The big question was, could we get enough of this swell before nightfall? 
I was calculating that the swell would peak around 3am, so Friday's morning session would probably be better then Thursday evenings, except for the fact that the Spring Tide was bringing a 5.6' high tide in the am. So a good effort to get some time in the water on Thursday was put forth. So, Thursday evening Pete and I headed out to the Mesa again, hoping to get a similar session to last Friday. A good session at a beachbreak, although nothing epic. Friday morning I got to the Rincon parking lot at 6:05, suited up without looking at it, and brought the longboard for my best session of the season, a true Queen of the Coast morning. Doing some post-swell research I discovered that the peak of the swell hit the Harvest buoy around 10:30pm, with a largest significant wave height of 17.4ft. If there were any midnight ryders out there, everything was working for you.
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Wednesday, October 08, 2003
A Wednesday report off to the left. The Washington Buoy was at an amazing 38ft this morning, but that doesn't mean something big is our heading our way, since it appears from animated WAM's that the swells are all heading straight for Canada and the Pacific Northwest, not down here. However, the California buoy has just doubled in the last 6 hours, a promising sign.
Good job Santa Barbara County, you had a 56% voter turnout yesterday. An article about the 80 tons of dead fish hauled out of Ventura Harbor in the last few weeks due to the red tide. All the news that fits.
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Monday, October 06, 2003
A Monday report off to your left. A Sunday pic of Rincon above. Interesting article in the Independent and the Valley Voice about Bryan Conant, a former maps.com guy who has made his own map of the San Rafael Wilderness and offers them for sale on his site. Bruno from France is still kicking out surf paintings and has a new url he wants you to know about. Also, Panama Surf Expeditions is ready for you if you ever think to surf Panama.
Not much mentioned here about the 3 tropical systems raging down south. In short, Nora became a Hurricane with 80mph winds pointed to the North in our swell window and StormSurf thought we might see some if it today (ha). Nora is now a Tropical Storm headed for Cabo. Olaf, on the other hand, is close to Mainland Mexico and once was a Hurricane also but now just a Tropical Storm. Larry, as you may notice, is not of the Eastern Pacific Hurricane names (our "L" was "Linda" which was a Hurricane for 12 hours), but has gone AWOL from the Atlantic and is crossing over Mexico to come chill in the Pacific with Nora and Olaf.
This site is in need of some surf pics. You send. I post.
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Sunday, October 05, 2003
Over-Analysis of a small NW swell after a long summer.
An incoming swell was first brought to my attention by Blakestah on September 29. He had spotted perhaps the first big storm in the Gulf of Alaska for our winter, and figured it would take 85 hours for it's 14 second drivetrain to make it to San Francisco. The major forecast sites started yukking about the swell(s) at about the same time, but I decided for the first time to tune them out and use Blakestah's "how to" page to figure things out on my own. I figured the swell would hit Harvest from 305° and show up on Friday. I watched the buoys all week, spurring them along. I first noticed it hit the SE Papa buoy 1200 miles out on Wednesday, and then the California buoy about 24 hours later. By the end of the day on Thursday the San Francisco buoy was starting to see some 14 second energy.
I woke up at 6am on Friday hoping the swell would travel overnight and have arrived. I was wrong, their was almost no 14 second energy on the Harvest Buoy but I figured I'd head out anyway, lest I miss anything. A check south of Santa Barbara was showing nearly nothing, and Campus Point in Goleta didn't look promising either. I headed out at Sands and had an unspectacular session getting to know my new board/wetsuit combo in pre-swell waves.
I got to work and checked the buoys. The swell was sliding down the coast from SF, Half Moon Bay, and was at Port San Luis. An hour later the Pt. Arguello buoy was showing some medium period swell. A little before noon I saw the first signs of the swell on the Harvest Buoy, showing 5.5ft @ 14s. I decided to do a visual check and around 13:00 checked out North Goleta. It was still small and with poor form...messy and mushy. If I stared enough at it I could almost see an improvement, a set wave every now and then, but I think this was wishful thinking.
Finally cashed in the long hours of the work week to cut out the door around 4:00 and headed to the Mesa to surf with Pete, and caught what will now stand out in my mind as my first waves of our winter season. A Friday evening check at home of the buoys showed they had improved even more, and it was apearing to be out of the West more then I had thought. Saturday the So Cal Swell Model logged it's last update at 5:29am before it went down (and still is as of writing). I hit it down south with Unkle in what was certainly no epic conditions due to tide. Sunday am the buoys looked the same so I made a mid-day, low-tide session down south. A stop along to way to check out Rincon showed small clean lines.
None of this info of my stupid little buoy and visual checks was posted on the site for two reasons: 1) I did not want to contribute to the over-hyping of swells, and 2) In keeping with Tim's tradition of making SBS a place to archive sessions and swells as opposed to exposing where is breaking now.
In summary I hyped this swell up so much in my mind because I was wave hungry, and although I had three fun sessions, this was by no means a big enough swell to satisfy that hunger. Bring on more juice.
A very boring September Wrap-up is also available for your reading pleasure.
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Wednesday, October 01, 2003
October. It is finally here. I will attempt to reserve myself and my hype this winter when "Monster" swells are forecast, but just the thought of NW juice is glorious. Every forecast site out there is watching two promising systems, one North, one South. The Aleutians are waking up, and Blakestah is back talking about it. -SFSurfing is following a system off of Japan with potential. No promises on either, but it's safe to say that we're about to turn a corner.
Local News: Surfrider Meeting with HB-J this Thursday.
Since Santa Barbara Surfing has been up on the new server for one year, check out some year end stats:
Hits over 1 year: 1,531,769
Current Average Hits per Day: 5,787
Visits over 1 year: 169,870
Current Average Visists per Day: 608
1 Year of Bandwidth: 9.6Gb (sorry Jonah)
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Santa Barbara Surfing. Created by Tim Maddux. Continued by Pope.
from Tuesday and Wednesday. Today's picture is of all the smoke that was hanging over us on Tuesday. Looked like a nuclear winter all day. A write-up at Billboard.com of the Pearl Jam concert last night which featured guests such as Jack Johnson and Chris Cornell, who made it a Temple of the Dog reunion for the first time in 11 years. The San Diego Union Tribune has a updated page with minute by minute fire status. If fantasy football is your bag, you may want to check out fantasy surfer.
