So here we are, right in the veritable guts of an El Nino outbreak. Warm water has been pooling in the Eastern Pacific causing meteorological dominoes to fall all around the Pacific basin: high pressure in the Western Pacific, easing South Pacific trade winds, and rain fall in Australia's tropical north is declining. All these events are linked to El Nino.

Another event linked to El Nino is increased swell in the North Pacific Ocean. History shows each El Nino year to have delivered above average surf on Oahu's North Shore, and it's why this coming season is widely anticipated.

However Hawaii isn't the only place to benefit from El Nino. For the last four months the North Pacific has had an unprecedented level of hurricane activity, all of it linked to El Nino, and it's been sending swell to far flung corners of the Pacific Rim.

According to Ben Matson, "The recent westward hurricane track has activated an unusual south-east swell window across the North Pacific."

"Ordinarily, hurricanes and typhoons push westward across equatorial regions, before a slow northward turn near Guam that results in either a coastal crossing at the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, or Korea, or an accelerated extra-tropical transition as the system pushes northeast back into the Pacific Ocean,” says Matson.

But this year we’ve seen multiple hurricanes develop much further east than usual - evident by their status as a hurricane, and not a typhoon (which denotes their origin, not any other characteristic) - of which a broad region of warmer sea surface temperate anomalies in the Central North Pacific have helped steer these system to the north-west earlier than usual. This has focused small, long period south-east swell energy up into the Kamchatka and Alaska Peninsulas."

Though the swells may have been unusual they certainly weren't unwelcome. Californian Cyrus Sutton watched as each hurricane traversed the Central Pacific, waiting for one to move into position before setting out on the mother of all surgical strikes to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

The wave he was chasing had no roads leading to it, was miles from the nearest town, and had never been surfed before.

Swellnet: How many trips have you had to Kamchatka now?
Cyrus Sutton: I've been twice now. Two weeks each time so a month total.

How long have you spent watching it on Google Earth?
I've scoured every part of that coast. I first got turned on to that part of the world through Ben Weiland who has a blog called Arctic Surf. He and Chris Burkard organised our initial trip there three years ago.

The first trip wasn't very good but the coastline and setups looked unreal with no people anywhere.

Surfers automatically build up a bank of knowledge for each coast they visit: watching swells, analysing conditions, comparing results. Where are you at with this process?
I feel I have a pretty limited understanding of it all at this point, there's still so much to learn.  

How long - or indeed, how limited - is the surf season on the Kamchatka Peninsula?
I've only been in late summer both times so I don't really know but the locals say there's waves in the waist to chest big range pretty consistently throughout the year due to a deep offshore trench that lines the east coast but that the winter has the biggest waves.

It’s on an east facing coast, how tricky is it to find waves when you’re on the ground?
Really tricky. There's a lot of factors working against you which is probably why so much of the coast is still unexplored.

First off, a lot of the breaks are rivermouths and there is so much fresh water from snow melt that the sand bars change drastically from week to week. Also it's hard to see what the breaks look like with swell because there are almost no roads there leaving only helicopters or Google Earth to explore. Neither of these options work well because it's so remote that lot of the coast hasn't been updated frequently on Google Earth and the helicopters are ex-Soviet with ancient instrumentation so they won't fly them in even the lightest amount of rain and a lot of the swells come with a bit of weather. They are also crazy expensive.

Because of all this you really have to guess what spots would be like if there's swell and just go for it.

When did you spot this wave? How long have you had your eye on it?
The wave was found by Ben Weiland. It looks like a flawless left river mouth. You can actually see the barrel throwing from the satellite picture. We took a helicopter out there three years ago and it was flat but you could see the potential. I've been mildly obsessed since.

This wave seems a rare one. Now that you’ve been there and surfed it, how often do you think it’d break?
Not very often, it sits in a bay that is blocked from the majority of the southerly swells by a large peninsula to the south. It takes a really east swell which is rare and it has to be bigger - say over head high - for it to even start to break.

Something we couldn't tell by looking at it from above was just how deep the water was in the bay off the sandbar. It was really deep. The wave just kinda slabs and triples up on dry sand and closes out under head high on all but the lowest of tides. 

And how would you describe the wave itself? Indulge us with a Western world analog if you can.
I never saw it on all its glory but I imagine it would be like a reverse Kaifu Rivermouth in Japan. It probably gets pretty heavy and bends pretty hard at you.

Cyrus dials it in from the far outskirts of the Pacific Rim. Note the electronic bear proof fence.

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