La Jolla conditions
La Jolla visibility today: the rain bailed, the chop stayed
No rain on Friday after all. The B streak ended anyway.
La Jolla visibility today, Friday, Oct. 23: the Dive Pro beta model says C. That's 10 to 14 feet, medium confidence. About half the odds sit on the C, roughly three in ten on a B, and about one in five on a D. Four straight B days end here.
Here's the weird part. The rain that was supposed to be the problem is gone. Yesterday's run had about a quarter inch landing today. This morning's run has zero, and zero over the past week too. No storm-drain runoff to worry about. The water still got knocked down a grade.
Blame the swell period. Period is the gap in seconds between one wave and the next. Long-period swell comes from storms far away and rolls in as big, organized lines. Short-period swell is local, born close by, and it shows up stacked and messy. Today the main swell is about 3.5 feet at 5 seconds out of the west, with a second one, about 2.4 feet at 6 seconds, from the same direction. That's short stuff. Waves that close together keep kicking the sand off the bottom before it can settle. The model's surf number is about 4.3 feet.
Wind is mild. The model keeps it around 10 miles an hour or less all day, gusts near 13, out of the northwest. A bump on the surface, not whitecaps.
The tide sets the window. High of about 5.3 feet around 8 a.m., then a big drop to a low near 0.7 feet at 2:09 p.m. That's a swing of more than four and a half feet. The model counts the falling tide as a negative, because outgoing water is less likely to pull cleaner offshore water toward the beach. Go early, near the high.
Water is still warm for late October. The nearshore buoy off Scripps read 72.9 degrees.
On bacteria, as of Thursday morning's County beach list, La Jolla Cove was still under the advisory it has carried since Sept. 29, and Children's Pool has its usual long-running one. The La Jolla Shores stations and WindanSea were open.
The Scripps Pier camera's latest frame is from Thursday evening. It shoots around midday and late afternoon, so a morning picture from yesterday is normal. The automatic camera grade didn't post, so today's call is the model on its own.
Looking ahead, the model has a C every day through Halloween. A longer-period swell, around 12 seconds, shows up in the numbers Sunday. That's the kind that usually lines things up cleaner than this week's chop. We'll see if the grade agrees. Beta model, not a promise.