Welcome to summer
Victoria Forecast by Craig Brokensha (issued Monday 1st December)
Best Days: Early Wednesday and Thursday morning on the Mornington Peninsula
Recap
Saturday was poor as expected with onshore winds and small amounts of leftover swell from last week.
A strong new SW groundswell filled in Sunday and peaked through the morning to a solid 3-4ft across 13th beach on the Surf Coast, with a touch less size around Torquay while the Mornington Peninsula offered 5-6ft sets.
Conditions were varied with funky winds due to a surface trough sitting just to our west resulting in E'ly tending NE winds and clean conditions during the morning across the Mornington Peninsula ahead of afternoon sea breezes, and variable winds on the Surf Coast.
This morning the swell was much smaller and easing and unfortunately early N'ly winds seen up until 4:30am on the Mornington Peninsula, swung to the W/NW around dawn and have since given into a weak onshore change. Torquay was clean and small in the 2ft range, but is now slowly deteriorating with the onshore.
This week (Dec 2 - 5)
Welcome to summer! And with that we're looking at a typical poor week of summer surf with no real decent swell and onshore winds.
Tomorrow morning will be the last clean morning on the Surf Coast but there'll be no real swell to surf with tiny 1ft waves across most breaks. There's an outside chance for an early N/NW'ly on the Mornington Peninsula, but again the size will be limited to an inconsistent 2ft to maybe 3ft and not worth the effort.
A late onshore change tomorrow will signal the surface trough pushing across us and with this we'll see onshore E/SE winds linger into Wednesday (albeit without much strength and possibly variable early) before stronger SE winds kick in through the day.
A small increase in long-range and very inconsistent groundswell is due through Wednesday but not above 1-2ft on the Surf Coast and 3-4ft on the Mornington Peninsula.
Thursday looks to be a touch better east of Melbourne with a morning E/NE'ly a possibility as Wednesday's swell backs off a touch, while another trough sliding past us during the afternoon will bring poor onshore S'ly winds Friday.
This weekend onwards (Dec 6 onwards)
Into the weekend onshore winds are due to continue into Saturday with no real decent swell, while Sunday should become better as winds tend more NE, although exposed breaks across the state will be the only option. Only small background levels of SW groundswell are due to 2ft or so on the Mornington Peninsula, while the Surf Coast should see easing levels of E/SE windswell.
Longer term there's still nothing significant on the cards, and as I iterated at the top, welcome to summer!
Comments
Would you expect some bigger swells during the summer? Or is it best just to forget about them?
Yeah, there's always some decent swell events through summer, but the winds generally don't play nice with the westerly storm track sitting further south and highs moving across us resulting in more NE to SE winds instead of NW to SW.
Numerous big wave spots in Vic operate best under NE winds. There are more places to surf (both big or small swells) under NE winds. You just have to rule out most of the surf coast. Summer can be great.
Very true that, it opens a whole other world of options.
I will be over phillip island/peninsula, so those NE's will come in handy. Can't be as bad as a qld summer i suppose haha.
I think you mean spring WarHawk, heading into summer and autumn is when Qld starts to get their best swells. Trade-swells mixed in with the odd bigger pulse of cyclone swell here and there. And yes PI loves a NE'ly.
Summer is definitely better than spring. I just recently moved down from sunny coast. Thing is with summer there is rarely a favourable wind. And the cyclone swells usually only leave about a day or two window after it passes where the wind swings offshore. And 90% of the breaks up there cant handle more than 5-6 foot. The quality swells are definitely few and far between. Some great spots when they turn on though, i think you caught noosa on the pump a while back?
Yeah true that, you'll score much better and more consistent waves on PI.
And yeah, Ben and I scored the only week of decent swell all year in March this year while we were up there webasting the Noosa Festival of Surfing.
First and only time I'd been to Noosa, surfed every breaks and absolutely loved it. Couldn't imagine what it'd be like without swell but. Beautiful place but it'd do my head in scraping for average swells with hundreds!
https://www.swellnet.com/photos/swellnet-sessions/festive-season-noosa
https://www.swellnet.com/photos/swellnet-sessions/noosa-double-take
Plus there's the "forgotten coast".......... Next Sunday/Monday might be the go......