You didn’t have to be a well versed surf forecaster to know Bodhi was off his rocker spewing prophecies of a 50 years storm that would bring the biggest waves man has ever seen to…Bells Beach (errr, somewhere in Oregon). He was mostly wrong. In fact he was very wrong – on predicting the timing, the location of the storm, and well, he was crazy to think Bells would turn into some outer reef distributor of 100 foot waves.
Well, as if enough weird stuff didn’t come with all the El Niño madness the Atlantic Ocean just threw a curveball at the world. Hurricane seasons is officially on each year from the beginning of June until the end of November, making this week’s Hurricane Alex one of the most random storms of its kind ever. To be exact, when the National Hurricane Center upgraded Alex to a hurricane this week it became the first hurricane to form in January since 1938 and the first to occur in January since 1955. While crashing through the Caribbean Alex produced some great surf through the week before moving on and downgrading, sending more fun surf to the East Coast.
But even though Hurricane Alex had a short, odd lifespan as an official hurricane it still has some legs in relation to surf. Moving over the Atlantic by Friday as a tropical storm with winds of 70 mph winds, Alex is about to merge with another system off the coast of Greenland. That’s leading forecasters to predict some swell for Western Europe and Northern Africa for the last chapter of Alex’s unique journey. We’re not expecting it to turn into the massive, life threatening surf Bodhi braved in an attempt to paddle to New Zealand, but for anybody with the chance to ride waves there this weekend is in for a swell unlike anything else they’ve ever surfed. And that’s a historical fact (unless you were surfing in Spain 61 years ago).
As for anyone curious as to what this says about climate change or the forecast for 2016’s official hurricane season, your response depends on who you ask. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground seems to think this is a direct product of global warming, even though hurricanes have formed in every calendar month in the past.“It is unlikely that Alex would have formed if these waters had been close to normal temperatures for this time of year,” he says. “The unusually warm waters for Alex were due, in part, to the high levels of global warming that brought earth its warmest year on record in 2015.”
