The Hurricane Kyle Followup

The surf was pretty big here this morning---up to 4 feet overhead on the morning sets, smaller as the tide went out and the day wore on. High tide was 7-something, the wind light offshore (west-northwest). We looked at it in Kill Devil Hills, then went up the Beach Road to Kitty Hawk. We entered through a huge shorebreak around 10:45 a.m.

Some of you may have read a previous post featuring my whining about the poor condition of our local sandbars. Swells have shown over them this Summer and early Fall, but nowhere seems to break like it used to.

Richard and I stood in a group of long time local elders at 9:15 a.m. as we all came to unanimous agreement on this subject. We also concluded that today's surf was too big to make a swift judgment on the present condition of our sandbars since last week's northeaster---too soon for that. We laughed at two other of our kind hesitating to make the sprint through the shorebreak south of us down the beach. Today it was breaking 3 bars outside. We would need evidence of waves breaking on say, the first or second bar to really know if our sandbars were back again. This is where we usually surf our typical head to 2 feet overhead Fall waves. We'll get to that sometime soon I'm sure. You see, this is the local marine geology learning cauldron. This is where real learning takes place.

However being an East Coast surfer, you learned, like no other surfers on the planet how to be wrong in your predictions and projections about what It will be like tomorrow or the next day after. Shifting sandbars and unpredictable storm tracks, speeds, and intensities help us here too. So....

Today, contrary to my predictions in yesterday's post, we surfed a very large, deep sucking out ground swell with an acute north angle. We paddled out, just the two of us, and surfed glassy conditions on a pitching, huge bowl beside a developing riptide, alone for about an hour. So much for my prediction that the Kyle swell wouldn't reach us till tomorrow or tomorrow night. What do Right Coast surfers know anyhow, huh?