Shortcuts: How to Create Your Own Surf Forecast
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Short Sands
Short Sands is a small break in York Beach that faces NE. The wave is fickle, but can be a goofyfooter's dream when it's working. This beach offers steep, fast, hollow lefts with an occasional right. The perfect combo is north swell with a south wind, which is uncommon in Maine but still possible. If these conditions do occur during the summer, which has happened before, good luck - surfing is forbidden here, and violators face stiff penalties like tickets and fines. Best swell direction is north. Optimum winds are from the south.

How to Create Your Own Surf Forecast
Our MoreBeach surf forecasts are generated by computer software and are usually very accurate. But you may do better by checking out multiple sources and applying discernment of your own experience and common sense. A good first step is to check the wave forecast from the US Navy known as North Atlantic WAM.The WAM forecast looks 6 days out and shows low pressure systems as they build and move. It's interesting to see hurricanes form off the coast of Africa, move across the Atlantic and then up the Eastern Seaboard. From a New England surfer's perspective, a beautiful WAM forecast will show a massive low parked some 300 miles off Cape Cod for a couple of days combined with gentle offshore breezes. Wave heights are shown in colors and a scale (in feet) appears at the bottom of each image. There's an image for every 12 hour period. Note that "00Z" means midnight and "12Z" means noon... Greenwich Mean Time. That's 6 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.

There are WAM forecasts for the entire globe. One reason California gets better surf than New England is that California receives swells that are generated off the coast of Antarctica! You can see how this happens as well as checking out future surf conditons in all of the world's oceans by looking at the Global WAM forecasts.

The next step is to check out the wind forecast. Big waves are generated by onshore winds during a Nor'easter; but the surfing only gets good when the winds turn offshore and cleans things up. Go to Weather.com, enter the zip code for the beach you're interested in, and click on the 10-day forecast. Then, on the bar labeled "Forecast Conditions," set the drop down menu to "wind speed." This will display wind direction and speed. The wind direction means where the wind is blowing from. Northeast means onshore winds on Cape Cod and offshore winds on the southern coasts of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. THis also applies to much of Rhode Island and Maine. If you see a hurricane offshore and 5-15 mph winds out of the west, then it's a good time to plan a few days for epic surf almost anywhere in New England.

Surf-Forecast.com, based in the UK, offers great forecasts giving wave height and wind speed for almost every major surf break in the world. Note that wave height and wind speed are shown in metric units - meters and kilometers per hour.

And, of course, we think very highly of Magic Seaweed. They provide surf forecasts for many of the world's major surf breaks and supply our surf forecast charts at MoreBeach.

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