Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Monday 25th June)

Best Days: Tues/Wed: mainly light winds and easing S/SE swells. 

Recap: Excellent waves Saturday with 3ft+ sets early, easing during the day, and conditions were clean with offshore winds. Sunday saw very small surf for the early session and a southerly change kicked in around lunchtime, building windswells into the afternoon. A stronger S’ly groundswell travelling behind provided great waves today under a light offshore breeze though wave heights came in smaller than forecast, around 4-5ft at south facing beaches. 

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Queenscliff looking mighty fine this morning

This week (June 26 - 29)

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Note: Today’s Forecaster Notes will be brief, as Craig is away on annual leave

Today’s southerly swell is easing, and the general trend is downwards through the middle of the week.

However it’s not as simple as our current source linearly fading away to a benign ocean state. A series of fronts trailing the initial system (responsible for today's swell), pushing through the lower south-eastern Tasman Sea, have generated secondary S/SE swells that’ll provide more energy (though smaller in size) through Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Having confidence in the timing and longevity is each pulse is difficult, but as a broad guide it appears that the next pulse will push through tonight (providing good energy Tuesday morning), with Wednesday evening seeing the final round that'll ease through Thursday (a tiny pulse is possible on Friday but it won’t have much size).

Winds look funky this week too as a weak trough slides down the coast, against a high in the Tasman Sea. This is not expected to be a major swell producer for us any more, but we’ll see a freshening NE trend later Wednesday and into Thursday morning that may kick up some small NE windswell for Thursday. I’m doubtful we’ll see much more than a couple of feet from this source. 

Prior to this, expect south facing beaches to roughly hold in the 3-4ft range on Tuesday morning (probably a little bigger across the Hunter), easing to 2-3ft by Wednesday morning, then abating abating to 1-2ft on Thursday. Surf size will be smaller at beaches with less southerly exposure.

Friday will finish with freshening offshore winds and small residual swells across open beaches.

This weekend (June 30 - July 1)

The Southern Ocean storm track will be positioned outside of our swell window for the second half of this week so in the absence of any notable synoptic development in the Tasman Sea, we may be looking at tiny swells for the entire weekend with offshore winds. 

There is a chance for a small sneaky south swell originating from my favourite unusual swell window - the waters exiting eastern Bass Strait - where a front will push through on Saturday. At the moment the fetch looks a little too westerly for my liking, but if the models tweak the alignment over the coming days, a small flush of south swell for overnight Saturday, holding into Sunday morning can't be ruled out, up to 1-2ft at south facing beaches and 2-3ft in the Hunter.

Let's take a closer look on Wednesday.

Next week (July 2 onwards)

Nothing out of the ordinary on the long term charts at this stage. There's a few of the usual frontal progressions modeled below Tasmania that'll likely provide some kind of useful south swell next week, but I'm not keen on the broadscale pattern at the moment so it's not worth locking in anything.