Tassie Surf Cams
We've got three Tasmanian surfcam locations ready to go, but haven't been able to get them in to our schedule. I'm hoping this will happen in the next couple of months.
That's good news, where will they be?
No clues until they're up and running :)
Any update on this, it's been 4 months?
No ETA yet, sorry bish.
I really feel you bish. Especially the last swells were very annoying.. pumping Scamander and EHN was chunky. Hope one of the new cams will be down there.
Cheers
Thanks zeta, it's a problem all too often for us, isn't it? The mainlanders have no idea just how specific our swell windows and setups are, it would drive them nuts if they tried scoring surf down here on a regular basis!
Regarding an Eaglehawk Neck cam: to be honest, I'm not convinced that anything real is happening, swellnet isn't able/willing to produce any concrete details, and we're long past their own timeline. That makes me suspect that they were just sidelining my interest in getting a (competing?) project up and running. Am I wrong Ben? If so - prove it!
Bish, just publicly commenting here proves that something 'real' is happening. Why would I make myself accountable otherwise?
Swellnet is a business, not a publicly funded government service, so we work within the realities of commercial boundaries. The fact is that (1) surfcams are incredibly expensive, and (2) the Tasmanian surf population is very small, and hard to justify spending money on surfcams when we could be bolstering our surfcam network in much more populated areas (ie Sunshine Coast). Otherwise, why do Coastalwatch have zero presence in Tasmania - not even a single surf reporter - and why did Coastview recently close down?
However, I don't have to discuss any of this publicly, for reasons of commercial sensitivity. For example, I don't want my competitors to know what is happening behind the scenes. But I'm happy to state here and now that we have three Tasmanian surfcam locations ready to go - one of which is EHN - and as soon as we're in a position to launch them, we will.
Not bad for a free service, eh?
Thats great news, thanks ben.
Second that, thanks Ben. Might save me some petrol every now and then when they are up.
Nice diplomatic reponse to Bish...
I don't need to be so diplomatic though...
Seriously Bish, maybe consider pulling your head in a bit. As Ben said, this is a FREE service (unless you pay for premium) turning a profit largely from advertising. It costs swellnet time and money to set up cams and there aint that many surfers down here relative to the mainland to justify the investment. Swellnet isn't a friggen charity dude and they have absolutely zero obligation to either do what you want them to do or prove, explain or justify what they may or may not be doing.
Yeah, it's hard to tell which spots will be firing from just the forecasts down in Tassie... pretty much everywhere... the south arm breaks aren't that easy to tell from just forecasts either. The winds do weird stuff and the small swell window + tidal attenuation etc make it pretty hard to know when '2-3ft' will be solid 2-4ft or gutless 1-2ft. Add that to the ridiculous inconsistency of the banks and it can be infuriating unless you live a short drive away. It's all super vairable... boo-fugging hoo. Seriously, at least we have the forecasts running from a consistent model (arguably the best out there) so that we can slowly learn how to interpret it more accurately for specific breaks. Web cams are just cheating even more. Do some hard yards and suck it up when you get skunked... it's part of the package. The sense of entitlement is astounding....
Sometimes I wonder if we could produce banks by dropping some larger stones down at goats or so...
Yeah, zeta... Same down here at our one little easy to get to cove....
But as far as surfcams go, mehhhh...... Bloody mainlanders ;)
Big rocks.... maybe. Would need some serious study to find something that would work... or just try a few simple things and see what happens! I'm sure the libs will fund it... tourism and all.
With the demise of Coastview, we lost the Eaglehawk Neck surf cam. That was such a useful resource for us
Hobart surfers. For example, being able to verify if that swell being observed up on the Scamander coast was actually reaching the bottom end of the East Coast, saved many a wasted rush out to the coast and vice versa of course!
I was having a whinge over here: http://www.swellnet.com/forums/swellnet-forecast-notes/121476#comment-27...
So I thought it might be a good idea to brainstorm ideas to rectify this. I'd be willing to approach some businesses down there and see if there's any interest and explore ways to fund it. Perhaps Tasman Council as well, I think they had a stake in the old Coastview cam. I haven't personally set a remote cam up like this before, except for the front end website feed side of things, so any technical tips, recommended hardware etc. would be interesting too? Also I don't know what the bandwidth is like down there, but given that we have a couple of cams set up on the ski field at Mt Mawson that can manage static images every 15 mins via an auto dialing 3g connection, something like that should at the least be possible!