The surf was a mess but it was light wind and sunny skies. About mid morning it started blowing offshore and by 11 it was really starting to kick in out of the NW at about 25-35 with higher gusts. Sound tide got on the road in Avon again and they close the road at S-Curves also. A couple of people paddled out but it was too much wind and swell still.  We watched for a while and a few short shoulders were caught and that was about it.  The swell dropped a bit and it became more manageable but there were very few rides. Occasionally a good one was had. I watched someone try to paddle into one and their board got ripped out of their hands by the wind and was spinning in the air like a top.

A very peaky shifty swell from several directions.  Someone brought out some jet skis and they did some tow ins allowing people to get into the wave early enough to get behind the peak for a barrel which was pretty impressive to see.  Jeff and I paddled out between the jetties, the wind was slightly more manageable there and it wasn’t breaking out quite so far.  It wasn’t as big as behind the motels but we were able to get more rides.  We were amazed when getting in the water as it easily had to be close to 70 degrees. Unheard of for Dec. and with the Air temps around 40 with a 25-40 mph wind it made it bearable as the wind just cut right through you.  Swell came up pretty strong out of the north this am and the water temps plummeted overnight to the coldest of the season.

My guess would be about 52 degrees.  What a temperature change in about 12 hours. Jeff said as he was going out of Hatteras inlet this am the water temp was 45 degrees. If you got lucky today there was a good one to be had but there was a mega current out of the north and a lot of close outs.  There was a lot of denial paddle outs and most everyone lasted for just a few waves before getting tired of the battle. On Monday morning there was still a strong swell coming in out of the north and the water temps dropped even more hitting our first day in the upper 40′s.  It might have been 50 but it was a cold 50 with the air temps only reaching a high of 42 with a cold NW wind still blowing.  The tide was too high all morning making for strange conditions with the good wave if you got in the right place at the right time.

For about 45 minutes in the early afternoon at mid tide it was good , lining up nicely with a current you could almost keep up with. But then the tide dropped and the current increased rapidly and even though there was the occasional great wave it was really hard to find.  As I’m finishing this up on Tuesday the swell is all but gone.

The new one doesn’t have the concave deck, not quite as thick and we updated the nose.  It doesn’t have the old school thick down rail nose. Color wise as you can see it was very similar.  Fun to do as I don’t get to do those kind of color jobs to much these days. It’s glossed and polished just like the old one and Curtis said it was a good one to polish because it really made the bright colors pop.

The old one I felt had some really small fins on it for a twin so we increased the area of the fins a little bit also. Dimensions are 5′ 7″ x 20 1/2″ x 2 1/2″  It has a 13 3/4″ nose and a 15 3/4″ tail.  The wing is up 10″ from the tail and across the tips of the swallow it is 4″.

By the way they do a good job at the surf camp in the summer if your looking to send someone, check them out at SurfHatteras.com

Early morning at the jetty

We’ve had a pretty good run of surf here this summer.  I wish I had some more pics of the better days but Daniel was one of the “surf sacrifices” for the first swell of the summer. The 24th of June produced a nice NE swell with clean conditions and the early morning had a few overhead sets with light offshores.

The day before my son Hyatt was working on his car and stuck his hand in the fan blade requiring seven stitches in the pinky finger. Daniel was out surfing early that morning and was caught inside on a larger set . Someone was outside taking off to late , and as Daniel did his duck dive the nose of the pearling board pierced his foot requiring stitches and left a nice bruise.

Todd up at OBBC took a nose to the leg , more stitches and we had all the makings of a surf sacrifice. Small rideable waves followed the rest of the week if you played the tides and the wind and on Monday the 6th of July there was a choppy swell on the south side with a pretty stiff SW wind that picked up overnight.

At about noon that day the wind went north and left us with nice glassy conditions and a nice head high south west swell. The swell changed rapidly throughout the day but some bars worked good on low tide and some worked good on higher tides so you would surf one spot for a couple of hours and it would stop breaking but if you looked around you could find another spot to surf.  There has been quite a few good sandbars this summer from the pier all the way to Hatteras which is unusual but we’ll take it and enjoy it.

They have been changing constantly so you have to keep an eye out. For the following 3 weeks weeks we were in a weather pattern that every few days another front would make it either just to or just below the Carolina coast and as the front would stall small little lows would develop along the frontline creating small but fun SE swells that would last from just a few hours on the right tide to a day or two.

Generally the surf has been better at lower tides as we have had unusually high tides this summer and the sand bars on the north side have been real deep with a steep beach except for at the Lighthouse. Many days even low tide looked like high tide.  Saturday the 11th was one of the better days, started out choppy in the am with some head high sets, but cleaned up in the afternoon with the dying wind. A soft mushy day it was but hey it is July and July is usually hot and flat with a SW wind blowing at least 27 days of the month. Thursday the 23rd was the best day of the month as a small low pressure area developed to the SE of us moving rapidly up the coast.

Early that morning the wind was NW with both sides having clean conditions and both sides having the same size swell.  The north side was peakier and not as clean in the am and the waves were backing off on the high tide.  The south side had a nicer lined up swell and because it was SE and not a NE wrap swell it had some nice shape mostly lefts and there were plenty of places working so it was easy to find a spot to surf. As the tide dropped the wind backed up W and then SW so the north side cleaned up nicely and where there had been no sand bars all summer there was now plenty of places to choose from.

It’s nice when you get swells that no matter where you check there is a wave to be had. The following morning early the swell was actually stronger but a SW wind that had blown overnight put a good cross swell into it and the waves were closing out a lot more. It dropped out quick that day and a crossing SW wind messed it up but remember it’s July and there was still waves.

Let’s hope it continues in August. Surf pics on this post are taken by Daniel Pullen on the afternoon of the afternoon of the 11th.

If you have been to Hatteras any time in the past 5 years and there was a swell of some kind you probably saw Joey out on his green fish.  Joey  rides short boards also but likes his fish designs done old school.  The green one was glassed with all 6 0z glass ,  Green resin tint, cut laps, glass on twins, gloss and polish – the works. I think he rode it so much that it had been delaminated twice and repaired twice gaining weight each time and it was never a “Super Light” to begin with. Last summer he ordered a new fish and this one was to be a little different than the old green one. This one had the old school nose but a modern tail with a tri fin, not a twin like fish usually are done.

He said he liked it pretty much but only got to ride it a couple of times. Shortly after getting it he took a trip down to the Shackleford Banks to catch a SE swell. He caught some nice waves but paid the price.

The only way over is by boat and he was using a jet ski to get across. On the way back he was towing his boards behind the jet ski and it was pretty choppy going into a stiff nor’easter and they broke loose while he wasn’t paying attention. I think he lost 3 boards that day, and he searched for them as much as he could before dark but never found them. (Somebody somewhere has a nice red fish.) So it’s now been a year later and Joey saved up enough money to replace it. Joey is going to school at COA and working commercial fishing so it took him a year to do it but we just finished up the new one. This one is done all old school just like the green one was.  A nice red tint, with cut laps, glass on twins , double pinstripes and a gloss and polish.

Enjoy the photo gallery of the making of Joey’s new red fish… 2 years later. Just as it got finished up it coincided with a nice June mini nor’easter and a couple of fun days of waves.

Yeah, I know this is supposed to be about surfing but there hasn’t been much this month and the water has been crystal clear. This is a very rare occurrence on the Outer Banks and I wanted to share these pics with everyone.

After the last post, the water has stayed clear for almost 2 weeks. There has been a couple of small SE swells pop up , bringing in the gulf-stream with few fun waves to go with them. On Saturday the 6th a front passed through early in the morning and there was some swell to be had on the south side. All the surf reports predicted waves this day so there were quite a few people down. There were some shoulder high sets but the wind came up with a lot of east and killed it but then backed off in the early afternoon for a bit before picking up again.

The next day there were no predicted waves and the waves were about chest to shoulder, fairly clean with decent winds. The swell increased during the day peaking early afternoon. The water was crystal clear and looking at the waves in the morning the color looked like I was in the tropics.  No swell was predicted so there was no one around. I surfed early with one other person and did a second go out by myself. Even the bath house ( one of the more popular spots and has a decent sandbar now) only had about 3 people out.

The following week had little waves and you could get a surf in for an hour or 2 if you played the tides right but the real story is how many days the water stayed clear. Everyone forgot about surfing and was snorkeling, diving and spearfishing. Frisco was clear, all the north side was clear, I heard all the way up into Pea Island was clear.  Enjoy the pics, taken at the first jetty.

All pics courtesy of Daniel Pullen

The thursday and friday before Memorial day there was some fun waist to shoulder high days in Frisco.  The strange thing was all of a sudden the water went back down to the low 60′s after flirting with 70 degrees all month.  All the sideshore winds all month have worked to dig a pretty good trench down the beach on the north side destroying most of the sand bars but for some reason there is a plethora of sand bars on the south side. It is very rare that that the south side has better sand bars than the north side. There wasn’t a lot of surf for the holiday crowd but there was finally some great weather and there was some small rideable waves.

On the 27th a low formed off to the south east overnight which was later called the first tropical disturbance of the season but with water temps in the 60′s it is hard to think of it as tropical. There was actually 2 small lows that formed if you looked at a radar map. This made for very unorganized conditions but at least there was some punch to the swell. One of the lows at one point was almost centered right on top of us and the other was about 200-300 miles to the SE.

That afternoon the surf and wind was all over the place but about 3 in the afternoon it went from wind chop to sheet glass in about an hour. For an hour or so there was some pretty juicy, shifty peaks in the head high to a little overhead range. As mixed up as the swell was so were the water temps. It was one of those days that during the paddle out the water temps would change along the way. Some areas were as low as 60 and you would be freezing and then 5 strokes later you would hit a patch of 68 and it would feel great. But it didn’t take long for the wind to come back up again as the low pulled off to the NE.

The next morning left us with an inconsistent small swell mostly about waist to chest high greatly enhanced by the clarity of the water. Early off the water was so Caribbean clear and as you rode the wave you could see every grain of sand shifting on the bottom as you rode along and you could look right through the wave with the back light of the sun coming up in the morning. As the wind picked up the water got a little cloudy but it was still just a nice day to be out surfing.

Daniel went out and took some shots of the jetty from under the water and the clear skies with light wind reminded me of the day last May that I had the opportunity to go flying with Dwight Burrus and get some shots of the jetties from above. As you can see buy the pics there is not a lot of jetty left and there is some pretty nasty stuff underneath the water. Be careful paddling around and between the pieces that are left standing. If you ding your board that is ok we can fix it but some people have suffered some pretty nasty gashes. unfortunately Daniel got out a little late as the water had started to cloud up but some cool shots nontheless.  (water shots courtesy of Daniel Pullen)  ( Air pics courtesy of Don Bowers)