I read that surfer mag called Stoke Report Surfline's little brother, yet, every single time I check SL, it's WRONG. SR has honest visual confirmation, so I look here and surfpulse (which is also eyeballed) every day.
I recently started using http://forecasts.swellwatch.com/ as well, and they seem to be accurate. Anyone been watching them for a while?
stormsurf is the real deal: http://www.stormsurf.com/page2/forecast/shortcast/ncal.html
This map pretty much tells it like it is (not really used for forecasting though).
http://cdip.ucsd.edu/?nav=recent&sub=nowcast&units=metric&tz=UTC&pub=pub...
The real challenge is anticipating what the local wind conditions are going to be. In my experience Stormsurf seems to get that right most often but they need to update more frequently.
Those graphical forecasts are great, and generally pretty accurate, I distrust any algorithmically derived forecast though, IE wave height will be x at place x. With just a tiny bit of knowledge you can take that open ocean swell and make yourself a pretty reliable forecast for how big the waves will be. The thing that takes more skill, and is harder to predict is the local winds more than a few days out. Even if the wind is light or slight offshore at the coast, it could easily be blowing 20 kts just offshore sending tons of high energy wind swell into the lineup effing everything.
Be interesting to get a new site started that has some better algorithms, there are a lot of smart devs on here, I know we have a couple of meteorologists, Time for stokereport to go full on forecast site?
