Surfline.com to give tutorial

A Huntington Beach surf forecasting service is teaching local surfers to “know before you go.”

Forecasters from Surfline.com will be on hand tonight at Rudy’s Pub and Grill for an event hosted by the Newport Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation.

Forecasters Charlie Fox, Katie Jackson and Kevin Wallace will help locals learn to predict big swells hitting from 56th Street down to the Wedge.

Fox said he will teach the audience how to use the Surfline.com website, swell charts and ocean topography maps to predict when and where large south and western swells will hit so they can more efficiently ride waves.

“What we typically do is give a little background on waves and how waves are created and how they make their way to local beaches,” he said.

Newport Beach surf spots enjoy a number of conditions that make for a fast-moving, hollow shore-break ideal for short-boarding and high-performance surfing.

Fox said a deep-water canyon off the Newport shore allows waves to grow in size and speed before being bent into ridable shape uponreaching shore. Surfers who understand swell directions, wave heights and wave periods ? the amount of time between sets ? can predict which beaches will be getting the biggest wave activity.

Understanding swell direction also allows surfers to account for nearby land masses like Catalina Island, which tend to block certain western swells coming from Hawaii.

“There are a lot of nuances for Newport Beach,” Fox said. “It’s correlated to the ocean bathymetry” ? underwater topography ? “and runs in all different types of combinations.”

Surfrider’s Ray Halowski said the group is holding the event on the peninsula this month to connect with Balboa surfers.

“Newport Beach is a city of many communities, and we’re just trying to reach out to different people and teach them about issues affecting the surf zone,” he said.