It’s something that happens to anyone who’s willing to hit the road to find better conditions. It’s a relative dice roll; even in the era of the Internet, swell models and specialized wave forecasting.
And trust me; no one’s a bigger Internet swell map nerd than yours truly. But something happened on Monday reaffirming that sometimes you just gotta go for it.
Seemingly out of nowhere – and definitely off the radar for most forecasters – Frisco was doing its best Kirra impression: Overhead, clean, offshore (NNE at about 10-15, which put a chop on Buxton, which was only waist high) and extremely hollow with some heavy ones grinding the sandbar.
Guess what? Only a handful of guys out. Sunny and in mid-50’s water. No gloves. No hood.
The definition of scoring.
But if me and fellow S&A dude Jaush Alley trusted blindly in what several sites’ forecast for Frisco, we may not have even checked it. In fact, our buds Travis and Chase did “the right thing” and made a bee-line to Rodanthe, where it was about head and clean the day before.
After the previous night’s festivities, getting down breakfast was somewhat of a struggle. But we needed no extra motivation when we looked over the dunes to find Raven Lundy and one of his intense buddies towing in to monster outside barrels (which were probably not makeable with paddle power).
The SSW long-period groundswell was working better for paddling nearby, so we made the call to Trav and Chase and told them to turn around and get down here.
Long story short, you almost had to get barreled to make it. We surfed all day until we couldn’t physically do it any longer. The beatings we took on the inside from these freight trains didn’t help the cause much either.
A few factors went in to Frisco being the unexpected honey pot on Monday. Apparently, the low that pulled off of the N.C. coast raced northward as opposed to its forecast of stalling, which created the perfect set-up for Frisco.
The sudden pull-out created a fetch of southerly winds stretched from New England to Puerto Rico: Swell, check.
The further away the low got from N.C., the less windy it got: Perfect offshore wind, check.
The sandbars were holding through all tides: Consistency, check.
The icing on the cake was the air and water temperatures, which made for a nice vacation from the frigid waters of all points northward. Even Buxton was in the low 40s.
And very few people were on it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to still check the models and forecasts. I wouldn’t have even been in N.C. if not for the potential for fun surf.
But you really have to roll the dice and go searching. You just might find something.
-- John CSB.
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