South-east Queensland and Northern NSW Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 18th December)

Best Days: No great days. Maybe Thurs AM across the Mid North Coast with a small peaky NE swell and a temporary light variable breeze at some locations. 

Recap: Stacks of E’ly swell  over the last few days throughout SE Qld - easing groundswell Saturday and building tradeswell Sunday and Monday - but smaller south from Yamba. 

Today’s Forecaster Notes are brought to you by Rip Curl

This week (Dec 19th onwards)

Just a quick summary for the forecast period as I’m on the road - apologies (short notes again Wednesday; back on deck properly Friday).

Northerly winds will create some issues in the surf department over the coming days. They’ll become quite strong across the Mid North Coast later Tuesday and into Wednesday, and will generate a poor quality windswell - but the fetch length will be too short to benefit SE Qld and Far Northern NSW with any real size.

In fact, based on model guidance we have eight days of northerly quadrant winds expected for SE Qld. Not all days will display strength, but this broader pattern signals a late return to spring-time weather, with the trades expected to remain a little too north in latitude to benefit us. We’ll see a temporary southward dip on Thursday (that’ll briefly pulse some fun trade swell for SE Qld Saturday) but otherwise most locations are looking pretty small and average for the short and long term. 

A trough will push into Southern NSW overnight Wednesday and stall off the Lower Mid North Coast, so we may see some small NE peaky waves early Thursday (from Wednesday’s fetch) with OK conditions in some locations (S’ly winds south from Port Mac, but light and variable winds north to about Yamba or Ballina). However surf size will be small and easing throughout the day. 

A small SE fetch off the southern flank of the trough may generate some energy late Thursday or Friday, but it’ll be small and mainly confined to coasts south from Coffs. 

Otherwise, the parent low to this southerly change, and a series of trailing fronts (all south of Tasmania) from Wednesday onwards will generate inconsistent, poorly aligned but long period S’ly groundswell for Friday afternoon (2ft+) and then Saturday afternoon (3ft+), exclusive to south swell magnets south of Byron Bay. Don’t expect much elsewhere. 

The long term outlook maintains some interesting tropical developments out near Fiji though the steering ridge is likely to focus it SE, into the swell shadow of New Zealand. So I’m not really interested in this right now.

Of much more importance to East Coast surfers is an unstable trough off the Southern NSW Coast from Sunday that should evolve into a solid local swell generating system early next week, though early indications suggest it’ll focus the best waves to the south, so we may not see much, if any love north from about Coffs. More on this in Wednesday’s notes.