The Fuyjiwhara swell has been right up there with some of the most intense powerful swells I’ve seen here, 4 days of 6-8ft swells. I paddled out Monday afternoon at Marias when the swell was 6-7ft @ 15seconds and I felt fear, awe and inspiration- I saw people getting annihilated, going over the falls, getting hurt, breaking boards, and getting amazing rides, it was awesome. Not sure how big the faces were(10-12ft) but some of the tubes were big enough to drive a car thru. I snuck out thru the channel on a boaty 7’0 step-up and sat waaaay outside dodging the big A frame sets. I caught a couple and got obliterated on my last one, dragged across the inside reef but I didn’t hit bottom. I’m just mind blown by the oceans power and majesty and grateful to be able to surf it and shoot it. Fujiwhara 25′ was one to remember!!

Saturday 6:45am DP WFL: There is still waves! It’s not huge, take a log and a fat fish and have some more fun. Rafa delivers!! Best groundswell spots look knee to thigh occ waist high at dawn, 036 is 5ft@10 SW inside 98 is 3@10 offshore winds, go surf! …Acc the forecast tomorrow there will be smaller swell, like a 1ft log swell but check it just in case and keep an eye on the offshore buoys to see if the swell is trending down. Also the best sand bars that wedge the 1ft swell will have plus peaks for sure. Thanks for the comments!! Please more!!

Friday 7am Weather Headlines: Rafael, waves and no destruction for WFL(full Friday update below).

So stoked on this new Rip Curl edit. 3 of my favorite surfers having fun and ripping! To see Tom Curren at 60 still getting parts in a major surf movie and he looks great is inspiring!! Throw in the 80’s vibe and killer soundtrack featuring the Divinyls and the Church and I’m hooked! Lazer Breathing Dragons is an instant classic and so cool! Steph kills it in this film!

Friday WFL 7am Still looking fun on the cams down south. Best south facers look to have clean swell this am in the 2-3ft range, slow fade is forecast today with knee high swell tomorrow but keep an eye on it in case it pulses over the weekend… GM waves looked so fun yesterday- Jersey?! Big brown tubes from what I saw down south… Today is a bit smaller but there is still surf esp at south facers. Good news: Rafa is strong!! He’s chugging due west at 9 and should throw back a small line thru the weekend. Did you ever say to your buddy(I know I did) ‘What if a hurricane got stuck in the gulf and just stayed there?’ Well,that is what is looking to happen. No hype but a small line is possible for quite a few days. Keep an eye on the wave model for pulses. I have no idea. I could be like ‘yeah pulse and it’s small and weak or no it’s gonna be small and weak and best south facer has chest high barrels so hard to tell the timing of it. Do this: Go surf and when you do take a log or mid for tiny swell but keep your shorty around too, just in case. Glad you got got surf. If you are 100% positive you got sick from surfing the gulf let us know so we can warn others, otw if your great let us know, come in and claim it!! Back with a better look at today and tomorrow.
Details by Diaco updated 11/8
Calm till November 7
Thursday Nov 7: Knee to thigh high am building to chest high and clean at best hurricane swell spots, SE and ESE winds at 15plus.
Friday Nov 8: knee to waist plus at best south facers, ESE winds at 15.
Saturday Nov 9: Knee high SW small line at best g swell spots, E winds at 10-15, possibly watching another low in the Bahamas.
Sunday Nov 10: Knee high at best h swell spots, E winds at 10-15.
Monday Nov 11: Knee high at best h swell spots, E winds at 5-10.

NW PR The latest:

aurasurf.com

Heavy Waves in PR surf story: Saturday my new son-in-law, Trent messaged me and asked me if I wanted to surf an outer reef early Sunday morning. We’re pretty much guaranteed to go out there and be able to surf great waves by ourselves. The swell had been pumping and I was hoping it would drop because it gets crazy out there if there’s too much wave action or wind or current… Sunday morning arrives and it looks good, head high range but it’s so far out it’s hard to tell exactly… It’s not closing out. It’s peeling into the channel but it is on the threshold of being too big. Surfline is saying that it’s going to pulse again but we paddle out. I didn’t say anything but I’m nervous and it’s a little out of my comfort zone just being out in the middle of the ocean with that much swell(this is the same storm front that gave you guys crazy surf last Thursday). Out there it’s like Monster Hole but maybe even farther and we get out there and there’s current and wind and the waves are huge, 6 foot easy. All of a sudden the horizon gets dark and a massive wave comes in like I’m talking a Tres Palmas type wave, 8 foot and I’m going to get smoked. I’m in the wrong spot and the last thing I see before I try to duck dive is Trent suspended at the top of this 8 foot wave, ducking through it! So glad he made it but I’m toast… So I death grip my board and I’m just getting tossed and thrown and over the falls and fortunately I did not lose holding onto my board because I did not want a trip to the bottom. That reef is dark and spooky. It was hilarious- just heavy, windy, big waves, gnarly conditions, black diamond, everything… The current, it was coming out of the channel and taking us off the peak. It was super hard to line up but we did it. It was an experience! We did it… I caught a few waves I was not really able to enjoy, LOL and Trent got some long rights which is why we went out there… Getting in was no easier. It was like paddling against Haulover Inlet, LOL… But after 15 minutes I made it to shore. I look out and Trent is a speck a quarter mile offshore and my wild brain is just praying a bunch of huge sets don’t get him. Finally he gets a left and comes in, game over… Thanks God, what awesome power you have!!! Paddling out at Domes is about 1 million times easier.

Caribbean Blogger Friday: I think I’m healing… the holes are still there but the wounds have a ‘floor’ now so it’s supposed to be healing from the inside out. The surf finally got fun here so I’ve been shooting one handed on a tripod, what a pain… Iberia has a flight from SJU to Madrid that is just under 8hrs overnight so that’s our plan… 5 more days until the flight to Spain…
NW PR 4/21 Caribbean Blogger- My buddy Blake turned me onto a surgeon from Texas on vacation in Rincon who was staying a dogmans. He cleaned my wound and stuck a wick down in it and since then it has started to heal!!! Hopefully it keeps getting better!
NW PR 4-18-25: good morning I just wanted to let you know what’s the latest -how my season went… why I’ve been not updating as much… first off on January 14 I fell headfirst into a piece of coral at Pistons on an overhead left, kind of freak accident, the worst accident I’ve had in 40 years of surfing, i had a big hole in my forehead… there is a local Surfer who is a general surgeon at the hospital, he sowed me up and did a great job. I went back to him a couple weeks later to get a spine out of my toe that was getting infected from a sea urchin. At that time he saw a spot on my back that looked suspicious so he did a biopsy and found out it was skin cancer …so he wanted to operate on my back asap to take the cancer out. it’s on top of my left shoulder blade he stitched it up, gave me a flap. He told me to rest and take it easy so I didn’t go to work. I haven’t been surfing, but I live my normal life and I think just that maybe I popped the stitches or something. It’s just a very bad spot, a very difficult wound to heal, so now I am trying to heal …basically i have a hole in my back that’s very slow to heal and I need to not move my left arm, especially… which severely limits what I can do on the pc screen like this… I am using voice recognition right now …to top it all off we have this epic trip to Italy planned in two weeks to take my father-in-law‘s ashes back to napoli and I’m stressed about that. I want to be healthy and better for the trip …anyways it’s super hard for me to type but I’ll try and keep up the website. There’s a pretty good chance that for the month that I’m in Italy I’m not gonna be able to update so I apologize for that …May is usually a pretty slow month …right now I’m just praying that my back gets better.
July 25 surf story:
Monday 7/7 WFL WX Blog: Stop me if you heard this before, but I grew up in Seminole 2 miles from the beach and when I started surfing, I became completely obsessed with it. But the problem was I lived in a place that was almost always flat. I was already interested in the weather so just transitioning to finding out when waves would happen came pretty natural for me so here’s how I did it back in the day. Number one: There was the St. Petersburg Times weather section, it had a little black-and-white map showing cold fronts. This came out every day you spent $.25 and got the newspaper and you could see where the cold fronts were advancing across the US. That newspaper also contained a NWS marine forecast, which would tell you the winds in the cold fronts that were coming. That was our bread and butter surf in WFL… This would clue you in to whether the front had NW winds or N winds- if it was 15knts or 20 maybe even 30 for a very strong front… 2. Dick Fletcher and Roy Leep both came on at exactly 6:15 every night and they could let you in on what the marine conditions would be like and that’s how we did it… Sometime in the early 90s maybe sooner than that I got turned on to NOAA weather radio, which gave buoy reports… That helped a lot for hurricanes but this was before wave models… At some point in the 90s or right around 2000 NOAA Polar Wavewatch III came out and that was my bread and butter wave model for 15 years, it was very detailed for WFL and highly accurate. This brings us to the current state where every year models were getting better and better, more and more data being pushed into them, more accuracy farther out with storms like Irma, Maria, Ivan, even last year Milton and Helene- you know check those details down to last minute which brings us to now and some of the information is already missing and I’ve noticed over the last two months beyond 72 hours the American model, the GFS, which was the gold standard- literally the mother of the wave models and usually highly accurate has been missing the forecast a bit… It’s just not as accurate as it used to be. For example Chantal was originally forecast to form in the gulf that didn’t happen. The flow around that trough turned out to be a bit stronger than what was forecast also… In conclusion- It just feels like we’re gonna go back to the dark ages. The viral video going around is the Meteo Morales talking about Dorian- I remember Dorian as maybe the worst hurricane ever! I mean imagine a cat 5 sitting on top of your island for five days. It was absolutely horrifying. Maybe it did not crush the headlines because it was a tiny island in the Bahamas (Freeport)… In that video, he’s talking about how the hurricane was going to stop and make a right before it hit the Florida Peninsula, which was heavily populated so that was important information. I guess the point is if that happens again this year, are we gonna know it’s going to turn or are 5 million people going to try to evacuate all at the same time? Personally, I’m prepared to go more by my gut and climatology rather than rely strictly on the models especially beyond 72 to 120 hours when they’ve been especially flaky so let’s see how it goes but it seems really dumb to cut off our forecasting models or take away data that could save lives…
About the pic below: This would’ve been TS Bonnie at the end of June 1986, kind of a classic 25/85 storm that moved to LA and eventually became a hurricane before landfall. I remember bc I was 16 this summer and taking driver’s ed at PPHS… Bonnie had kicked back a small 1 day SSW swell from 25/85… AMI must have been a couple feet bigger than this wave in Pinellas. This was not a great surf spot but it was close to home, we rode our bikes to surf this… We would have seen Bonnie on the news and rode our bikes with our boards hoping for surf and lucking out even with these tiny waves. I think if I remember correctly this was the only swell we got that summer besides some trough waves at one point… 2 swells the whole summer… We were hyped for Bonnie bc 1985 was so good. 1985 had hurricane swells every month of the season and being teenagers new to surfing we thought every summer was like 1985. But 1986 was the yin to 1985’s yang. 6 named storms, very slow and most of the storm names that year went unused. Funny to remember, so much nostalgia- I know we were playing INXS ‘Listen like thieves’ until the cassette player burned up! I’m riding a 5’8 Fox Wave Weapon shaped by Greg Loeher…