South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 20th October)

Best Days: No great days. As per Friday's notes, there'll be waves on offer all week, but nothing worth rearranging your diary for. 

Recap: Small average waves with generally poor winds (save a handful of brief windows of light winds early morning at a few locations). A new east swell seems to have been detected at the Gold Coast buoy late this afternoon (peak swell periods of 13.5 seconds), whilst a southerly change advances along the North Coast (at the time this forecast was prepared, midway between Evans Head and Byron Bay).

This week (Oct 21-24)

We’ve got a pretty ordinary week of waves on the cards. The new east swell that has apparently reached the Gold Coast buoy this afternoon will be very inconsistent as it gradually builds towards a peak throughout Tuesday, and won’t have a lot of size either.

In addition to that, freshening S’ly tending SE winds in most regions will wipe out surf prospects at open beaches. Some of the semi-exposed points in SE Qld and Far Northern NSW may have small peelers, but it’ll be hard to offset the inconsistency of the east swell (with open beaches unlikely to reach much more than 2ft to maybe 3ft top, we can expect smaller surf everywhere else). So don't start making plans for a mad dash down (or up) the coast.

A ridge muscling up across the Coral Sea will also generate a small short range SE swell for exposed beaches in SE Qld and Far Northern NSW through Tuesday and into Wednesday (peaky 2-3ft) but it’ll be of little benefit to southern locales, and the swell it generates will be biggest at south facing beaches - which’ll consequently be wind affected. So keep your expectations very low through the next few days. 

Elsewhere, we’re looking at a return to a general troughy pattern across the broader East Coast through the second half of the week, which will ultimately lead to a period of northerly winds and mainly small residual swells across exposed beaches. No great surf is expected throughout this time frame however there’s certainly a chance that you could pick up a brief window or two of light winds and small peaky beach breaks if you’re lucky. 

This weekend (Oct 25-26)

I know you want me to say good things about the weekend, but I just can’t do it. This lengthy troughy period is expected to hold through the weekend, with only a very vague chance that it’ll form into anything remotely worthy of a decent swell generation. The most likely outcome is a continuing combo of small E’ly and NE windswell with mainly NE winds. Hopefully Wednesday will have a clearer picture, because the one I’ve got right now looks pretty muddy. 

Long term (Oct 27 onwards)

And if those notes weren’t full of enough excitement, the long term outlook appears to be as equally dreary with nothing of any major interest on the cards beyond the weekend. That’s it, I’m outta here ‘till Wednesday.