South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Friday 11th March)

Best Days: Great waves most days, though initially best suited to protected points in SE Qld and Northern NSW over the weekend thanks to local winds. Lighter winds early/mid next week and plenty of fun beachies across all coasts. 

Recap: A temporary lull in easterly energy occurred on Thursday but we’ve seen a slow building trend today as the trade swell has started to kick back into gear. The largest waves have been in SE Qld and Far Northern NSW; surf size has been a little smaller across the Mid North Coast. 

This weekend (Mar 12th - 13th)

No changes to the weekend forecast.

The synoptics show a strengthening E’ly dip SW of New Caledonia, embedded in the broader trade flow, and plenty of swell generating winds extending further east into the South Pacific. This region will remain quite active throughout the forecast period.

Essentially, we are expecting a further slow building trend over the weekend, ahead of a peak in size on Monday. In actual fact, the latest model guidance has slightly strengthen the core fetch and pulled it a little closer to the mainland, so we should see marginal bigger wave heights than what was estimated on Wednesday.

Saturday morning should begin much the same as what we’re seeing this afternoon - broadly in the 3ft range across SE Qld and Far Northern NSW, a little smaller south of Ballina - but a minor increase is expected into the afternoon as the swell continues to muscle up. Sunday will see a further size increase throughout the morning, and the late afternoon should be pulling in 4-5ft sets across exposed beaches.

Local winds will strengthen from the south-east all weekend as the ridge tightens up across the Coral Sea and Queensland's coastal margin, and it’s likely that most open beaches will become blown out, probably early too. This means that the sheltered points will have the best waves throughout the forecast period, though they’ll be smaller in size. 

Some locations (i.e. Coolangatta) may see brief windows of light SW winds both mornings around dawn but across the broader SE Qld and Far Northern NSW region this will be the exception rather than the rule. However, the Mid North Coast will be sufficiently far south of the ridge to experience lighter onshore winds, and a considerably longer period of light variable winds early morning, across a greater expanse of the coast. The only downer here is that surf size will be a little smaller. 

Next week (Mar 14th onwards)

The models have shifted around since Wednesday’s notes, but the good news is that there’s no major change to next week’s outlook.

The short range trade swell generated by the strengthening E’ly dip near New Caledonia will reach a peak across our coast on Monday, and exposed beaches between the Sunshine Coast and Byron Bay are now looking at solid 4-5ft+ sets at times. Expect smaller surf down the points but it should have plenty of push, and the swell will be quite consistent too. 

Whilst core wind speeds within this system are nothing over the top, the close proximity of this fetch to the mainland plus the slow westward track of the dip will accentuate swell heights and periods from the otherwise smaller theoretical maximum. Wave heights will be smaller south from Coffs (peaking around 4ft+ at open beaches).

Monday’s swell ease steadily into Tuesday (3ft+ or so in the north, smaller to the south) however a second E’ly dip embedded in the trades - this time located further east - is expected to remain active in our swell window from Monday thru’ Thursday. The difference with this fetch is that it’ll be a little narrower, positioned a little further from the mainland and will slowly retreat from the east - however its distance from the mainland means we’ll see a slightly more uniform spread of size. At this stage we should see surf size rebuild back up into the 3ft+ range on Wednesday, before leveling out into the 2-3ft+ range for Thursday and Friday. 

Looking elsewhere in our swell windows, and a strong Southern Ocean front passing south of Tasmania later this weekend is expected to push a ridge along the Southern NSW coast into Tuesday. Ordinarily, this system doesn’t look favourable for Northern NSW - or especially SE Qld - but I think we could see some surprising results from the resulting fetch.

The main reason is that it’s expected to remain near stationary for a few days (which is quite unusual in this neck of the woods), spread the entire width of the Tasman Sea from the southern tip of New Zealand up into the Sydney region where we may see the formation of a small closed low.

Most of this system will be aimed towards southern regions (south of Newcastle) but there are a few fetches I’ll be keeping an eye on next week - specifically those in the south-eastern Tasman Sea - that could line up for our region, and produce some fun SE swell around the 3ft+ mark across Northern NSW later next week (smaller in SE Qld due to the direction).

And a Tasmam Low is still modelled to develop mid-week, which could give rise to a punchy short range S tending SE swell (mainly Northern NSW) later next week too. So on the whole, we have three potential swell sources for the second half of next week - from the S/SE, SE and E. That’s a a decent bet each way, even if the likely surf won’t be terribly big.

As for local winds, we’re expecting light variable winds to settle across the coast on Tuesday (following a similar ridgey, but weakening pattern Monday, as per the weekend). Southerly winds will push up the Northern NSW coast mid-week as the closed low forms but at this stage it probably won’t affect SE Qld to any great degree, so in general variable conditions will persist north of here.

Have a great weekend, see you on Monday.