It’s been a dismal few months for surfers along Australia’s east coast. The nor-easter has been blowing day and night and bringing with it nothing but cold water, bluebottles, and a brand of wind-slop so bad that even the groms have been turning their noses up at it.
But things have started to shift a little in the last week. A southerly finally broke through the rank of all those high pressure systems sat over the Tasman and delivered a few waves. The temperature dropped. Surfers got wet again. Life returned to a more liveable state.
Now we have a cyclone marching towards us. Mother Nature sure doesn’t do things in halves.
Tropical Cyclone Oma has already destroyed homes and crops in Vanuatu, and according to numerous meteorology sites, will track closer to the Australian coast next week and likely upgrade from a category two cyclone to a category three.
Coastalwatch’s chief surf forecaster Ben Macartney says there is little doubt that it’ll emerge as a major source of swell for the east coast, claiming it could be a whopper right up there with the biggest tropical cyclone swells of the last decade.
Swellnet forecaster Craig Brokensha agrees that a good swell is on its way but isn’t so sure about the winds.
While us average folk should leave it to the experts to debate the particulars, a quick glance at a synoptic chart shows a pretty intense-looking onion ring spinning towards the lower Queensland coast this week. The mind can’t help but get ahead of itself when confronted with a sight like that. Every righthand point along the east coast (and there’s a lot of them) has the potential to fire up, and it’s likely that this time next week when we’re scrolling through our Instagram feeds, it won’t be clips from Hawaii or California we’re looking at, but rather stuff from our very own backyards.
In the meantime, stay off the piss, get in the water as much as you can to get your fitness up, and prepare yourself. You could score the wave of your life in a few days.
Oh yeah, and there’s a silver lining to all those nor-easters we’ve had to put up with. Sand. The stuff is packed in there good and hard.
Fingers crossed Huey delivers.