Afternoon update:

Cloudy skies and fun waves at the Bower late morning.

Sorry. Owe you a bit of an apology. As the Goat says to me often, “don’t always judge the surf by Dee Why!”. Well I didn’t heed his advice did I? When I went out to do some errands this morning, I chucked the board in the car on the off chance. At one point I swung by the beach near Marquesas and I was gob-smacked. What is this?? Head high plus sets with a ton of east in ‘em? Yikes! End of errand running, time to look for waves. I scoped Northy from afar. Looked like a few out, but not the sort of crowd to make me think it was much chop.

How could you not enjoy a wave like that?

Pointed the creaky old subaru southward and did the drive by at Dee Why (fallback option 1), over the hill to Curly, nothing too attractive (what is it with the banks there at the moment?), but looking down toward north head, I could see white water exploding along the base of the cliffs. Ah, hah! Just as I thought, there should definitely be something at the south end of Manly and at the Bower. 10 minutes later, I’m going by Dripping Wet and doing the goggle through the cars at North Steyene. Pull over? Naw… onward… Swell is definitely bigger as you head south along the beach and there are lots of dots in the water at the Bower (gee, whattasurprise). Okay, that’s the plan then, make like a dot.

Many went unridden at the Bower, including this one...

Jumped off the rocks and paddled across. Sets look good fun size, maybe 2-3 metres of face. And it’s pretty consistent too. Call me surgio partner, ’cause that’s where I like to hang looking for a fun one to rifle inside on. Happily I have my little Olympus 725 SW, so I grab you all a few stills and then shoot some stutter cam video (haven’t looked at that yet). Get a few waves in the near glassy conditions. Too bad the sky’s overcast. No pretty colours for the piccies. Oh well.

See a few folks I know out there too. Vibe is good because it’s so consistent. Water is cool (from the NE’r I bet). But it’s all good.

And here’s this morning’s report…

Hello Friends,

0730: as long as you can live with a bit of chop, there could be a little one.

Wind’s gone around to the south, the temp has dropped back and at around midnight, Huey kicked the swell rudder hard over to the SSW. It’s looking pretty messy and sideshore down at Dee Why, but there are a few bods in hunting for likely sections. Size is in the chest high range on the bigger ones. That’s down to the fact that the windswell has popped up to 3 metres at about 8 seconds apart. The hopeful thing is that there seems to be some 9 sec stuff in there as well, so I’d say your fave south corner options are worthy of consideration.

You may want to get on it earlier rather than later because the Bureau is calling for the current 20 kts of southerly to go SE as the day unfolds. And they say the swell will be dropping back at the same time.

Tomorrow is set down to have 10-15 kts of SE early, building to 15-20 kts ESE later. Not too appetizing sounding. Oh, and there’ll be a shower or two just for good measure. Over all it appears that we’re in for short period, junky, conditions right into the Friday. Happily though, it seems that we might have a fun size south pulse for the weekend. There’s a bit of variety in the interpretations though… wetsand.com predicts only a short pulse, while stormsurf is being more optimistic.

Have yourself a top old day, and if you’ve come across a site you think worthy of inclusion in my next Editor’s Picks, please use the form below to tell me about it.

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