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Struggling with an odd surfing question and have no clue who to ask?
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I'm gonna be in Romania this summer for a while playing some tournaments (don't ask what sport). They have the Black Sea there and I was wondering if that coast ever gets any decent, ridable waves? Wave models are showing 3 to 6 feet right now, but you can't trust them. Know anything about surfing that place?
asked by Alex
Tony Butt -- head meteorologist for Europe's leading surf forecasting web site, Surftrak -- responds:
The Black Sea is a bit like the Great Lakes -- a limited fetch area -- so the kind of surf you will get there will be short period and peaky rather than the classic, lined-up groundswell you'd expect in the Atlantic or Pacific from a distant storm.
According to my colleagues in Italy who have some more specific information on surfing in the Black Sea, the fetch is longer than Sardegna in the Mediterranean, so there is surf. They don't know the names of any spots, but it works when a low is sitting on Russia. Apparently, a big ship wrecked three or four years ago because of waves up to 6 meters.
Still, you're right to be skeptical about the wave heights you find online. The typical public charts you see from the WAM model don't give any spectral information about the sea state, which means that if there are a lot of different wavelengths mixed up together (like you might get in a limited fetch area), then this tends to show up as overestimated wave heights on the charts. If it's really clean lined-up swell (from a distant storm in a large ocean), then the wave heights on the charts will be underestimated.
I've yet to get to the Black Sea on Surftrak, but clearly, there must be something to ride. My advice is, don't expect J-Bay, but pack a 6'2" anyway just in case the tennis conditions aren't favorable. I'm sure there'll be no crowds.
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