Surf Check

A surf check is what surfers do before they drive to the beach, and live surf webcams do it from anywhere: the reef breaks of Hawaii, the beach breaks of California and the Gulf, the points of Australia's east coast, the big-wave slabs of Portugal and the cold beaches of Britain and Ireland. What you read is the size of the swell against the people in the water, the wind, offshore and clean or onshore and messy, and the tide, which turns a closed-out beach into a working one over three hours. The seasons run by hemisphere. Hawaii's north shores work from November to March and its south shores in summer; Europe's Atlantic coast has its biggest swells from October to March; Australia's east coast is best from March to August; and the dawn patrol, the first hour of light, has the cleanest wind almost everywhere.

7 streams in this collection