new kayak owner here

just ordered my wilderness ride 135. big guy. so i have a question. what site do you guys use to predict swell? i normally use pacificwaverider. but it has been wrong way too many times. and it ruins a "ought to be good day" of fishing for us. and help would be greatly appreciated

Regards,
Vin

I believe that most marine conditions sites use the data that NOAA supplies for free.  There are other ocean conditions models that sometimes get discussed in the background data on NOAA.  For the most part they are "greek to me".  StormSurf used to have an excellent indepth discussion on the modeling progam they used but I haven't looked at it years.

What I got was pretty intuitive, the farther out a predicition is the less likely it is to be accurate, with wind being the hardest to predict even just 24 hours out.  And swell (true swells, not nearshore local wind generated swells) info being the easiest to predict especially within about 72 hours since those swells already exist and are on their way and behave in a predictable manner.

So with all that useless soapbox talk, I almost exclusively use the NOAA/NWS point and click data.  If you've never used it here's a link for a point that is just offshore from Ft Ross.  The map is interactive, just drag it around and click on the point you want.  I've found the accuracy of this data to be second to none, although that just means as good as it gets, it's still a crapshoot.  One of the best parts of this data page is to drop down to the bottom of the page and select the hourly graphs.

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=38.49981784551419&lon=-123.24840545654297&site=mtr&smap=1&unit=0&lg=en&FcstType=marine

I also like Stormsurf.com for the way it presents the data.

Here also is an excellent thread on figuring out the the report really means.  Adam "fishunter" put together an excellent piece in this one.

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php/topic,32677.0.html

cool awesome info. thank you very much for that. i have never fished off a kayak in norcal. did it quite often in socal. it was nice to be out in shorts and a tank. now off to find some good dry gear for a large fella. lol

vin