good surfing conditions at San Francisco - Ocean Beach

i'm regrettably sidelined for a while - inflamed disc or something. :(
looks really beautiful out there. wouldn't say something for everyone, though. i only saw three he-men and one sup out. pushing triple overhead. bring extra arm muscles.

...Pushing triple overhead? Yeah right.

check out a spot without a parking lot for more size

Super fun at the smaller end. Enough energy out there to produce some solid DOH. Surprisingly good.

yeah, you heard me right. pushing TOH. i stand by my observation.

pretty amazing surf today. today was the day for magic! easy paddle out and some amazing waves that actually held up for a few hundred yards. the rip out was like a freight train and many were I was spent a lot of energy paddling in... got some good ones. crowd factor not bad.

Today was not triple overhead, check the buoy data, the buoys don't lie........

Maybe for someone really, really short it was?

@the beard: a buoy doesn't lie for the slice of swell that passes underneath it, but a swell isn't necessarily homogeneous. For groundswells, there's also the variable of bathymetry. Some sections of a break can get focused energy while others get defocused.

Ok, so 18 foot faces it is!!!!

The buoys lie, sometimes, and 46237 can be just downright mean sometimes and won't come out to play for days.

Gonna back off this one, as I will respectfully disagree.

It does bring up an interesting topic, wave height and who says how big the waves actually are? Californian scale, Hawaii scale, world scale, etc.

Thanks- The Beard

Glad we got it while we could. The whole troop of dolphins was out. I love how OB can hold a sizeable crowd - has to with the posters we have here.

SF is going to do it's usual poo in the water thing for the next week. Saw a vid of the city sewers on Dirty Jobs- some of those damn things are made of brick and supposedly 100 years old. Good luck getting the city to clean up that shit mess, or the Regional Water Board stepping up to the plate and (try to) make them.

Surfline Wave Height Scale, with photos.

http://www.surfline.com/blogs/forecaster-blog/surfline-wave-height-scale...

For what it's worth.

Oh crap I was under-estimating according to Surfline... Thought it's been a couple feet OH but really was DOH. ... that means that those DOH+ days were triple OH???

This kook has always used the 6'/12'/18' scale to designate HH, DOH, TOH. btw, that 8' pic looked closer to DOH to me.

all I know is...if sticker goes, then I'll go :), and sometimes I try my best to make him not go.
And if a wave takes more than two Mississippis to finish up while I'm standing on shore...I better be ready for the big hurt, if I do go.
Not all "DOH" waves act like the big monsters they are....and that being said...not all small waves act small either.
My point....You should be measuring things by risk/ability/hollowness/and other wave behavior...not just by some measuring stick.
Only 2.5OH right?

Buoys do in fact lie...

They do not measure wave height directly, they measure the amount of energy present in a non uniform sea state. They use equations to pull a frequency spectrum out of this. A frequency spectrum is just all the energy at different periods. At this point the energy is integrated over a given range of periods (and multiplied by 4) to come up with the significant wave height (Hs). Hs is defined as the average size of the highest 1/3 of the waves at any given time. Unfortunately, we are not surfing waves in the middle of the ocean, and what comes to shore is very different. Waves can be much smaller, or much larger than the buoys indicate depending on a variety of conditions.

Redtim-

Thanks for the very true information. However, a swell that reads 8 feet @ 14 seconds does not produce 18 foot faces @ OB. My point is to just call it what it actually is, and not what we want it to be. Thanks again for providing the detailed description.

- The Beard

also fwiw: some more nerdy wave algebra:
http://www.surfline.com/surfology/surfology_forecast2.cfm

Here is a handy chart:

http://www.stormsurf.com/page2/papers/category_short.html