surfing conditions at San Francisco - Ocean Beach

20" sounds kinda small unless you're a surfing mouse. :)

I'd get wrecked at 20-inch OB.

20 inch? here's the part where @KingofKooks posts his favorite remote control surfer video....

so is there a group consensus on the afternoon viability? i got stuck with a work problem in the a.m. and i was thinking the afternoon was possible. but now i'm feeling less sure (edited out ball shrinking comment btw). is it just going to be an unruly beatdown later?

What boards are people taking out to SFOB on a day like today? Full on guns? Or semi-guns?

Mine is 6'6. Being a not-so-good surfer, I'm much happier with the slightly shorter board that I know I can duckdive, and maybe pick off some of the smaller waves out there on a day like today. In any case, my board is a beater (complete with repaired/reinforced stringer) , so i don't feel too bad about saving myself and ditching the board if the cookie monster is about to fall on my head. (and won't feel too bad if, after getting back to the surface, i find that my leash has snapped, or that half my board has deserted me in favor of a carefree life on the high seas.)

I was out on my 6'3" today, total joke. The forecast was for small waves again this morning and I didn't check the buoys before getting in the car and just grabbed that board. Made the paddle easy as can duck dive it very deep. I didn't really get close to catching anything anyway (over the inner bar, set on the head, coudn't see anyone else anywhere, turned around and came back in), so the shortness wasn't really an issue.

looks like it cleans up and gets great again on sunday....

with a six foot swell you'd expect a 20s period to be at least 1.5x at OB. the stormsurf site has some nice info on this: http://www.stormsurf.com/page2/papers/category.html. it's always hard to estimate the real period though ... if you look at it now you'll see energy in pretty much all frequency ranges (see chart below). stokereport calculates the period as a weighted average of all the energy ranges (if anyone cares :)

i was thinking about changing the stokereport height graphs from "swell height" to "expected face size" using the stormsurf translations. anyone got an opinion on that?

the best buoy is cdip 142 which is (a) awesome (full spectral data) and (b) 4 miles directly west of sf, here to be exact.

it's used extensively in stokereport, for wave height and swell direction and composition.

@stokereport: How about instead of changing "swell height" to "expected face size" just have both? Leave the one, add the other. Same amount of effort on your part, and we get more graphs and things to not look at when we're grabbing the wrong board and heading to OB.

You can lead us to water... but then we stop listening and just paddle out.

just to throw in what i've picked up on my years surfing OB and my OCD buoy watching...i've focused on directions of swell and impact- mostly at ###### cause that's where i surf the most and because we all know the ###### gets full smack- no mystery. on NW swells at 280 - 300 degrees, you get the full impact as on S swells from 180-200 degrees. But I've noticed, say, the swell is 6ft @ 20 seconds at 302 degrees, the difference between ###### and ###### is GINORMOUS, it's moving past. You throw in WNW or WSW though, and those degree probabilites change and the wave (at ######) becomes more sideways and closed out. for what it's worth...

oh, and i know nothing about ###### cause i lost it in a breakup and just started sneaking back like a year ago :O ssshhh

@tcannon: one of the major design principles of stoke report is "more is not better". i've tried to keep it minimal. i've tried not to be surfline. i suspect that most people using the site are confused by the lines for both period and swell height and their mind would be blown to bits if i added a face height line. anyone?

my 2 cents - i say remove swell height. Why even go there? This is not and should not try to be a forecasting site. We all know what sites, buoys, forecast sites that do this and we can go there.

Your site is good at the post-surf updates and comments.

I find face height reports very useful. I like the way the Stormsurf Quikcast report and Surfline 5-day forecast emphasize face heights. For south swells in particular it's not obvious how swell height translates to wave faces.

@mr_poop_head: i agree that focus and addressing your core competencies is a good thing. does anyone actually like the swell and weather information / forecast? perhaps a user-survey is in order.