South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Wednesday 5th November)

Best Days: Sat/Sun: small peaky options (biggest in SE Qld and Far Northern NSW) with early light winds ahead of sea breezes. Tues/Wed: small mid-range east swell in most areas, with gusty southerly winds developing. Wed/Thurs: strong south swell, mainly across Northern NSW but a reasonable level of energy should reach SE Qld too.

Recap: Moderate south swell across Northern NSW Tuesday with E’ly winds. Size easing during the afternoon and into today as winds swung NE and freshened.

This week (Nov 6-7)

A gusty southerly change is approaching the southern NSW coast this evening, and is due into Sydney around midnight but will track only slowly northwards through Thursday, whilst weakening. We’re looking at an arrival across the Lower Mid North Coast during Thursday afternoon, probably reaching the North Coast in the early hours of Friday morning where it’ll then slide across the border during the day. 

Ahead of the change, N/NE winds will freshen across the coastal margin in all areas and this will be the only real source of new swell across the region in the short term. Most beaches will only see a couple of feet of mixed energy (also being some very small leftover south swell) but you’ll essentially have to work around the winds at various regional swell magnets to extract any real value. 

In general most locations will remain poor in quality until the change pushes through so for SE Qld this looks like being all the way through until about midday Friday.

Even the southerly change itself won’t be worth much more than a couple of feet of average, short range energy through until the end of the working week. A weak ridge across the central northern Tasman Sea may also contribute some low easterly energy into the mix but it’s certainly not worth getting too excited about. Overall a pretty average couple of days of waves ahead.

This weekend (Nov 8-9)

There’s been a slight improvement to the weekend outlook, but only just. The west-east movement of weather patterns across our region seems to have slowed slightly in the last few model runs, which will benefit us in a couple of ways. 

Firstly, it’s slowed the timing of a building ridge across the coast which is expected to renew northerly winds (now not due with any major strength until about Monday). As such, a weak pressure gradient will contribute light morning winds in most areas both Saturday and Sunday, resulting in clean conditions ahead of typical afternoon sea breezes (although, the remnants of Friday’s ridge across southern Qld may linger about the Gold and Sunshine Coasts on Saturday, maintaining a moderate SE flow - in any case, a brief period of early light winds are still likely).

As for surf sources, we’ll see a small mix of energy from the SE - originating off Friday’s coastal ridge - but this will mainly benefit the Far Northern NSW coast and SE Qld, and really only a foot or two of energy at exposed beaches on Saturday. 

A second ridge is modelled to briefly strengthen below New Caledonia on Thursday - reaching 20kts for a period of some twelve or so hours - and this should contribute peaky 2ft+ waves across the same region - mainly north of about Ballina through to the Sunshine Coast.

This swell is expected to push through on Saturday (probably not early morning, but should be in the water by lunchtime/early afternoon), before holding through Sunday. Unfortunately, wave heights will be smaller south of Yamba so don’t expect a great deal of action across the Mid North Coast this weekend. But there should be small but fun peaky waves both Saturday and Sunday mornings throughout SE Qld and Far Northern NSW.

Long term (Nov 10 onwards)

The other benefit of the modelled west-east slowing of weather systems later this week is that it’ll allow a small trough developing between New Caledonia and Fiji later this week to strengthen north of Fiji over the weekend. 

Previously, model guidance whisked this system away to the east (a relatively common occurrence), which had reduced its potential swell generating capacity. But the latest model runs have successively stalled this system to a point where it looks like it’ll generate a brief pulse of mid-range east swell for most regions, arriving on Tuesday and building to a peak on Wednesday.

At this stage it seems to be worthy of somewhere around the 3ft mark, but let’s wait and see how future model runs evolve things - the outlook is changing every model run and it’s best not to get too excited about these kinds of sources too far in advance. 

Elsewhere, a strong southerly change is expected into the lower Tasman Sea on Monday, and should generate a couple of days of strong southerly swell through Wednesday and Thursday - albeit accompanied by gusty winds from the southern quadrant. In fact we’ll probably see a building trend across the Northern NSW coast throughout Tuesday in the wake of the southerly change but this initial development is likely to be low quality and wind affected - the best surf from this source is much more likely from Wednesday onwards.

At this stage we could see south facing beaches up in the 4-6ft range across south facing beaches in Northern NSW, and due to the broad eastern and northern coverage of the fetch across the Tasman Sea, we should see a small but useful level of swell push north of Byron Bay and into SE Qld (thus, favouring the semi-exposed points with a good combination of swells and winds for a few days.. finally!). I’ll have a better handle on potential options in Friday’s update, but at this stage it'll be worth pencilling in mid-late next week for some reasonable waves in many areas.