Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Friday 6th February)

Best Days: Sat: good south swell with morning offshores. Sun: small but clean early. Wed/Thurs/Fri: small east swell building. Next Sat onwards: suggestion for an extended run of solid, building E'ly groundswell.

Recap: Solid building S’ly swell on Thursday but with dodgy winds. Wave heights eased back today, initially quite a bit early morning (3ft south facing beaches) before perking up again around midday, in fact there are solid 4ft sets showing on the Bondi cam this afternoon with lighter onshores. 

This weekend (Feb 7 - 8)

We've got plenty of surf on offer for Saturday. A renewal of S’ly swell due later this afternoon is expected to hold through Saturday morning before easing into the afternoon and then continuing a downwards trend into Sunday. 

Exposed south facing beaches should manage a few sneaky 3-4ft sets early morning (with bigger bombs in the Hunter) but it’ll be smaller at beaches without full southerly exposure. Smaller surf is then likely through Sunday.

Conditions are looking pretty good both days, with early light winds and afternoon sea breezes. Aim for a morning paddle for the biggest and best waves both days.  

Next week (Feb 9 onwards)

We’ve still got a small, interesting swell on the cards for Monday - a minor pulse of long range SE groundswell from a broad but ultimately poorly aligned low pressure system that stalled well SE of New Zealand on Thursday afternoon. We’ll really see just a fraction of glancing energy but  exposed beaches may pick up a couple of feet of inconsistent sets. The weekend’s south swell will also have eased quite a lot by this time.

Unfortunately, local conditions look potentially dicey with a ridge expected to muscle in from the south early morning. The models are split on how strong, and how far north it’ll penetrate (GFS looks poor for us, ACCESS looks 50/50 but EC looks reasonably positive). However locations south of the CBD are certainly at much greater risk of these winds developing (whilst locations north of Sydney have a reduced risk).

So right now without any major swell prospects on the cards we’ll just have to wait and see what eventuates. For my money (at three days out), we’ll probably see the S’ly change arrive close to dawn in the Wollongong/Cronulla regions, arriving on the Northern Beaches mid-morning and then the Hunter a few hours after that. 

The ridge should generate some local quality short range SE tending E'ly swell for the region on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at this stage the models are in general agreement that it’ll weaken and pull back from the mainland. So onshores are a risk but possibly not too much at this stage.

Also in the water on Tuesday will be a reasonable, if only small southerly groundswell generated by a front tracking south of the Tasman Sea on Sunday afternoon. South facing beaches should pick up some 2-3ft sets but we’ll have to wait and see what the winds do.

Elsewhere, and a weak ridge through the central Tasman Sea should maintain small levels of peaky easterly swell through the middle of the week. However of much greater interest is a broad belt of developing trades north of New Zealand from about Sunday onwards. Initially this will be primarily aimed at locations well north of southern NSW, however this fetch is expected to broaden and strengthen through the week, with current model forecasts showing quite an impressive swell generating region through Thursday and Friday.

The upshot of this is that we should start to see a small E/NE swell slowly building on top of the small E’ly swell from about Thursday onwards, but by the weekend we’re looking at a much stronger pulse of E/NE groundswell that could very well last several days (our model guidance - below - currently has 3-4ft surf early Saturday trending steadily upwards towards 4-6ft by the following Wednesday or Thursday: a six day run of pumping surf!).

Whilst this may be a little overly ambitious, all signs are certainly pointing to an extended run of quality groundswell from one of our better swell windows. Let’s tune in on Monday to see what the latest model developments are saying.