La Garde Guerin Surf Stats

The rose diagram illustrates the range of swells directed at La Garde Guerin through a typical April, based on 3352 NWW3 model predictions since 2007 (values every 3 hours). The wave model does not forecast surf and wind right at the coastline so we have chosen the most applicable grid node based on what we know about La Garde Guerin, and at La Garde Guerin the best grid node is 41 km away (25 miles). The rose diagram shows the distribution of swell sizes and directions, while the graph at the bottom shows the same thing without direction information. Five colours represent increasing wave sizes. Very small swells of less than 0.5m (1.5 feet) high are shown in blue. These happened 58% of the time. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red illustrates the largest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In either graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs. The diagram indicates that the prevailing swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was WNW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the N. Because the wave model grid is offshore, sometimes a strong offshore wind blows largest waves away from La Garde Guerin and away from the coast. We combine these with the no surf category of the bar chart. To keep it simple we don't show these in the rose diagram. Because wind determines whether or not waves are clean enough to surf at La Garde Guerin, you can load a different image that shows only the swells that were forecast to coincide with glassy or offshore wind conditions. Over an average April, swells large enough to cause surfable waves at La Garde Guerin run for about 42% of the time.

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