Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra Surf Forecast by Ben Matson (issued Friday 7th September)

Best Days: Sun/Mon: small peak mix of swells (mainly inconsistent E'ly) with generally light winds. 

Recap: Early Thursday offered a brief window of light winds before northerlies freshened throughout the day, with easing 2-3ft SE swell being replaced by a building NE windswell that reached 3ft late afternoon. This NE swell maintained into this morning but has slowly eased throughout the day, we’re now down from 3ft to 2ft at NE facing beaches. An approaching southerly change was just nosing into Kiama at the time these notes were prepared. 

This weekend (Sep 8 - 9)

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There’s not a lot of action expected this weekend. And we’ve got a complex wind outlook for Saturday too.

Tonight’s approaching change is expected to push through to the Central Coast by dawn, but an unstable pattern in its lee may create brief periods of light winds early morning (see image below, showing the patchy high-res surface wind forecast for 4am). However, on the balance we can expect gusty southerly winds in most areas with just a few outliers experiencing an hour or two of light winds ahead of the onslaught (i.e. Northern Beaches, maybe one or two spots in the Hunter).

As for surf, the fetch within the change itself won’t be particularly large nor strong, and will quickly exit to the north so we won’t see much swell from it. Aside from a small level of residual NE swell, we’ll also see some small E’ly swell from a fetch exiting western Cook Strait mid-week with sets in the 2ft, almost 2-3ft range. However this will be an inconsistent event and with poor winds in general (and building windswells during the day), it’s not worth getting too excited about. 

Sunday is a better choice with lighter winds, and small persistent E’ly swells from the same source as Saturday. Expect long breaks between waves, with exposed spots seeing occasional 2ft to nearly 3ft sets at times. There may be some small residual SE swell from Saturday’s local winds, but it won’t be very large. 

Next week (Sep 10 onwards)

Model guidance maintains the weekend’s small E’ly swell through into Monday, even slightly boosting swells periods.

I think this is a bit of a stretch given the Tasman synoptic, and in fact the models may instead be merging swell trains from a distant E’ly swell generated from a very large system well SE of Tahiti earlier this week. I’m doubtful we’ll see much size from it (mainly due to the poor orientation/swell shadowing from New Zealand, and the enormous travel distance) but the odd 2ft+ set every twenty minutes can’t be ruled out either. 

The forecast for the rest of the week maintains small surf from a couple of flukey sources. The Southern Ocean frontal conveyer belt looks like it’ll be slightly out of alignment for us, so we’ll just see minor long period energy glance the coast from Tuesday thru’ Friday. Most days won’t deliver much size but a few of these swells may monetarily perk up south facing beaches into the 2-3ft range (late Tues/Wed the best window, if anything).

Otherwise, the long term charts are suggesting a return to some trade swells in the Northern Tasman Sea from later next week onwards, which I greatly look forward to exploring in detail next week. 

Have a great weekend, see you Monday!