Charge your batteries The california gold rush beach edition is about to begin!

Tom_in_CA

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Mar 23, 2007
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Salinas, CA
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ha, "largest swell in decades?" I don't know WHAT they're talking about. The only reason some reporter is making some big to-do about this little bump, is that it's about the famous annual surfing competition. Truth be told, this is not a "big swell". Oh sure, maybe for surfer purposes, granted, suitable for surfing, etc.. But for beach erosion (our purposes) , no.

The buoy reports right now are a measily 10-ish ft. in Monterey bay. Ho hum. There's a long period interval though, which perhaps is great for surfing (so that the "lines" are "clean", as opposed to rapid intervals, which are "sloppy" for surfing).

But as it pertains to md'ing and erosion? Nah. A buddy of mine just checked out Santa Cruz main beach, and it's lame as h*ck. Sterile. No erosion.

Wake me up when the swells hit 15 ft. or better. Or if coming from the W or SW, sure, maybe as little at 5 to 10 ft. Otherwise, that article is making a big to do about nothing.
 

LootHunter

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Oct 7, 2013
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Orange County, CA
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Aww I was all excited about some possible sand movement. O well, still going detecting this weekend anyway :hello2:
 

sandnut

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Nov 17, 2010
149
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Good luck to you all !!!!!!:thumbsup:
 

Tom_in_CA

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Mar 23, 2007
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Salinas, CA
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calisbad, thanx for the link. I'm about an hour-ish south of that beach where this annual shin-dig is held. This morning's local papers here in CA had blurbs about the wrapping up of the annual surf contest too. One of the things your article didn't appear to say, but that was a side-note in our local paper, was that they lamented that the swells hadn't arrived as expected. That they weren't as large as had been forecast. Forecast at 15 ft (which, by the way, is the point at which NOAA triggers the "surf advisories", so 15 ft is *just barely* at their benchmark of such advisories). But that day (friday) only arrived at 12 -ish foot tops (if using monterey bay buoy anyhow).

And the direction was said to be "west", but when you looked closer, the actual direction was 280*-ish. That's not W - SW enough to have gotten into any south facing beaches. And 12-ish isn't high enough to erode W and NW facing beaches (because they're acclimated to higher levels of surf).

So essentially, it was a non-issue for md'ing and beach erosion. The waves may have looked nice in those pix, but my hunch is that they just routinely look good there anyhow (it's a "break" spot along the coast). And sure, this was a little "bump" in addition to that, but no, not of the caliber to erode beaches. The high tides were also horrible, so the ingredients for erosion simply weren't there :(
 

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