Hurricane Ernesto Brings A-Plus Summertime Surf To East Coast

Summer tends to take a familiar pattern year to year on the East Coast. There’s a spring chill until June when land and sea come back to life and you make the most of that daylight followed by an early summer swell, beverages on the boat, bluefish and the start of whatever side hustle you have for the next 10 weeks. The wind blows south every afternoon and dies in the evening. Then comes the annual seafood/music/art/whatever festival you look forward to, those two nonstop weeks of fireworks around July 4^th, mornings on the log or fish, the annual family reunion and that time-honored community surf event.

Since our lives are so efficiently documented on our devices now, the digital timeline of memories tend to resurface at the same point in the summer each year. And one might venture to bet that around the third week of August, you have some photos of a hurricane swell.

Mid-August hurricane swells aren’t usually the man-eaters. Ernesto, with the exception of flooding in Puerto Rico and a quick trip to Bermuda, stayed where it belonged – out to sea. And it delivered days and days of surf to the Caribbean, East Coast and Canada. He was being monitored for a week before getting named on August 12. He became a Cat 2 hurricane, then downgraded to a tropical storm, then back to a hurricane on Monday, as it made its transatlantic trip to Europe.

Ernesto wasn’t the kegger that goes down in hurricane party history. When the swell arrived for many, it was marred by sideshore winds, backwash, long period closesouts, or in some places, all at the same time. (Not to mention the population of a small city all trying to get the same set wave on the north side of any jetty or pier.) On the other hand, there was no stateside landfall, so you didn’t have to rip the saltwater-soaked carpet out of your friends’ house in 98-degree heat either.

But the East Coast doesn’t get four-day swells very often. So, when it does, even with southerly breezes and two block dumpers, you have time to find the glassy windows and the corners. And for some who went searching, it proved to be a score, maybe a similar score to Augusts past.

As we noted in our preseason hurricane forecast, the Tropical Atlantic was steamy. Now it’s virtually boiling. All indications are that late August and September will put even more and better photos and memories into your digital cloud. And hopefully, it’s a lot of “fish storms” that don’t make landfall. Don’t need selfies of you with the Red Cross.

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Related: Hurricane Ernesto Storms Through Caribbean, sets up Waves, Weather for East Coast