What are Good Surfing Conditions?

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to talk about perfect surfing conditions. You want the conditions to be perfectly glassy, as you can see they are today. Glassy means it's like a sheet of glass, not a ripple in sight. Ripples are caused by wind effects on the water. The wind effects can cause the water to cause a little ripple on the wave. Wind effects can also cause even better surfing conditions if you have an off shore event. An off shore event or Santa Ana event would mean the wind is coming from off shore, which means it's blowing out towards the sea. As it's doing that, the wind goes up the face of the wave holding up the curl a little longer before it breaks. If you have an on shore wind, that's going to cause a ripple chop effect on the ocean making the wave shut down earlier or slow down or be behind itself or close out. When you go surfing, technically you want off shore glassy conditions and the sun out, but you can't help that. You can go surfing in the snow; you can go surfing in the rain; you can go surfing at night if you have a full moon. All of these conditions have something of play in it, the high tide and low tide. High tide is good for really good beach brakes. A low tide can be great for some tide brakes, for some low tide reef brakes. It's always good to have a tide book in your car, which you can purchase from local surf shop. Surf shops we'll go into in another segment because everyone knows they're all over the place and they got 100 different names. The conditions are about the conditions. As you can see, today's conditions are about 2-3 foot, glassy, we have a southwest swell with the 200 degrees coming in from New Zealand I believe. This will be the peak swell day and then once again, we'll be back to knee high waves. Enjoy the surfing while you can."