South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast (issued Friday 14th February)

South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Friday 14th February)

Best Days: No great days.

Recap: Hardly any surf over the last few days, with most beaches seeing weak lines of a foot or less.

This weekend (Feb 15-16)

Don’t even bother with the surf this weekend. We’re not expecting any new swell of note anywhere in SE Qld or Northern NSW, and N’ly winds will become fresh to strong at times both Saturday and Sunday. These winds will whip up a peaky local swell but beaches facing NE will see the most size and they’ll generally be quite wind affected. Really not worth your time, money or effort.

Next week (Feb 17-21 onwards)

A trough will push off the southern NSW coast on Saturday, forming two lows in the Tasman Sea - a primary low east of Tasmania, and a small embedded low offshore from about Seal Rocks on Sunday night. This will drive a gusty southerly change across the Mid North and Northern NSW coast early Monday morning, reaching the Qld/NSW border on Monday afternoon.

This change will generate a southerly windswell for exposed beaches but no great size is expected from it, especially in SE Qld (due to its direction) - and winds will be gusty from the S/SE at the same time, so conditions will be poor (there won’t be enough size for anything worthwhile on the protected points). 

The primary low responsible for this change is expected to track rapidly south-east after forming in the southern Tasman Sea, dragging the northern low away from the coast at the same time. This will reduce the size and longevity of any swell generated on Monday. As such, Tuesday will see easing low quality short range S/SE swells across open beaches with light winds tending NE as a new high builds in the Tasman Sea.  

On Wednesday, we may start to see the arrival of a small trade swell, generated by a deepening trough of low pressure well south of Fiji over the weekend. No great strength is expected within this fetch so at this stage we can expect generally small surf from this source (inconsistent ~2ft+)

Also on Wednesday - it looks like we’ll see a repeat of our weekend’s weather pattern, with an approaching trough from the west spinning up a low off the South Coast during the day. This should give rise to a small peaky NE windswell Wednesday ahead of a building S’ly swell sometime later Thursday or maybe Friday.

In fact, the latest model guidance suggests the system developing in the Tasman Sea mid-next week will be significantly stronger than what we’re expecting this weekend, and could occupy the region for a day or two. Such a scenario would give rise to a large south swell across the entire NSW Coast (peaking around Friday/Saturday in Northern NSW) however as is always the case with a swell with any southerly component in it, expect much smaller waves north of Point Danger. Let’s just pencil in the prospects of an active Tasman Sea later next week with a view of something worthwhile next weekend, and review the specifics on Monday.

Long range (Feb 22 onwards)

At the moment, next weekend will probably be near to the peak of the aforementioned south swell, or more likely on there backside of this event. Beyond that there’s nothing of any interest standing out in the long range charts.