Victorian Surf Forecast by Craig Brokensha (issued Friday July 12th)

Best Days: Tomorrow

Features of the Forecast (tl;dr)

• Large W/SW groundswell building tomorrow (peaking PM) with light to moderate W/NW winds, tending W/SW-SW early PM and increasing into the late PM
• Easing groundswell Sun with some building S/SW windswell along with strong SW-S/SW winds
• Strong SW-S/SW winds Mon with moderate levels of S windswell
• Strong but easing S/SW tending weaker SE winds Tue
• Strong SE winds Wed AM, easing
• S/SW winds Thu
• Inconsistent W/SW groundswell building later Thu, peaking Fri with strengthening N winds

Recap

The surf was tiny and wind affected across the Surf Coast yesterday while locations to the east were doable for the desperate but all in all not great under strengthening northerly breezes.

Some new W’ly swell showed later and this has held this morning with clean conditions across the Surf Coast, bumpy to the east.

This weekend and next week (Jul 13 - 19)

Tricky.

That’s the wind outlook for the weekend but after swinging this way and that owing to the development and movement of a strong low east of Tasmania on the weekend, it looks like we now have some consensus on what’s in store.

Firstly, our large W/SW groundswell is still on track with it due to arrive tomorrow morning ahead of a peak into the afternoon. 

The source was a strong polar frontal progression pushing up towards us from the south-west of Western Australia, with the Surf Coast due to reach 5-6ft tomorrow afternoon with 8ft sets across the magnets east of Melbourne.

Conditions are looking favourable most of tomorrow morning with a W/NW offshore that will start shifting W/SW-SW early afternoon and then fresher SW into the mid-late afternoon. This should see good surf holding until about mid-afternoon, when conditions will then start to deteriorate noticeably.

It’s the outlook for Sunday that’s the trickiest as we see the low forming just off Tasmania, retrograding back to the west and what this will do is unfortunately bring strong S/SW-SW winds that will increase into the afternoon. The chance for an early offshore on the Surf Coast looks slim to none but keep an on the local wind observations just in case.

The groundswell will be on the ease as local windswell builds, with the Surf Coast easing back from 3-5ft and 6ft+ to the east.

Unfortunately the low will dominate out wind and surf outlook through most of next week with it stalling across the west coast of Tasmania, directing strong SW tending S/SW winds into us Monday with a slim chance for an early W’ly wind.

In any case the swell will be all junky windswell and raw so not great quality at all.

A small shift of the lows centre further west on Tuesday may see strong early S/SW winds, easing and tending lighter SE during the morning, but again there won’t be any quality swell in the water and it’ll not clean up enough to make the beaches enticing.

Looking at the middle to end of the week and the models diverge on the end position of the low/trough with EC showing strong but easing SE winds on Wednesday, shifting back S/SW on Thursday while GFS has S/SW winds the whole time.

Regardless, the surf looks to remain very poor.

By Friday we should finally see some north in the wind as the instability clears to the east (shunted by increasing frontal activity coming from Western Australia), along with some inconsistent, small W/SW groundswell generated by a low firing up north of the Heard Island region on the weekend.

At this stage we may see inconsistent 2ft to occasionally 3ft sets on the Surf Coast, 3-5ft to the east but we’ll confirm this on Monday.

Longer term, the frontal activity moving in from Western Australia should finally bring some better swell energy into next weekend/the following week but check back Monday for an update. Have a great weekend!