Southern Tasmania Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 18th October)

Features of the Forecast (tl;dr)

• Small onshore surf Tues
• Small clean waves Wed
• Tiny to flat but clean Thurs/Fri/Sat
• Building mix of swells Sun with onshore gales developing, easing Mon, chance for options at protected spots

Recap

A few fun waves over the weekend and today, though unable to be capitalised by most surfers due to the lockdown. 

This week (Oct 19 - 22)

Forecast data looks uninspiring for the rest of this week, but we should see small leftover waves for the next few days thanks to a trailing polar low/front below the state yesterday that’s generating some minor S/SW swell for our region.

This should maintain peaky 2ft+ sets at exposed beaches on Tuesday, with a reinforcing swell keeping size just up to an inconsistent 2ft on Wednesday though it’ll really start to slow down after this.

Surface conditions should slowly improve through Tuesday as winds become light and variable by the afternoon, though lingering morning onshores are likely, so expect bumpy waves to start with. Wednesday is a better bet as a high pressure system develops to our east, setting up moderate NE winds across the open beaches. Expect long breaks for the better waves, but there’ll be small peaky options for keen surfers. 

The rest of the week looks nondescript with tiny surf and fresh offshore winds.  

This weekend (Oct 23 - 24)

The synoptics for this week show a classic regional blocking pattern (see below). Our primary swell windows have already shut down, and so with no new energy inbound for the start of the weekend, we’ll kick off proceedings with minor residual energy and a moderate westerly change on Saturday as a weak front clips the coast.

Sunday has more size promise, though strong onshore winds are inbound as a new low pressure system develops east of Tasmania and pushes north towards Southern NSW. 

These onshore winds should build local windswells across the region, but we’ve also got some small groundswell on the way too. The early stages of Saturday’s front is starting to form way out west of Heard Island (see above), and over the coming days will strengthen into an impressive system in the Southern Indian Ocean, before weakening as it reaches about Western Australia’s longitudes later Thursday, eventually limping across the south-eastern corner of the country by the weekend.

Unfortunately, it looks like the associated small groundswell will go to waste thanks to the accompanying southerly winds. We’ll have to wait and see if the local S’ly windswell is big enough to fire up the sheltered points, though I’m skeptical right now.

Next week (Oct 25 onwards)

Nothing major standing out in the long range outlook at the moment.