Superstorm Riley Day 5: The Best Day Of Swell… So Far (A Gallery)

As mentioned in yesterday’s dispatch, another Nor’easter was set to hit the east coast today, and it did so with gusto. 

This storm, Quinn, brought serious weather across the entire northeastern seaboard. There were blizzard-like conditions in New England, New York, and even down in New Jersey, and strength-wise the winds teetered between gale and tornado. With the front passing off the coast, onshore winds turned side, and eventually those sideshore winds turned off, which, if you know anything about east coast surfing, it’s that this type of weather phenomenon is intrinsically tied to quality surf. Especially when there’s underlying groundswell to cross up the short-period storm fetch. 

Riley, meet Quinn — your new bedmate in the western Atlantic.

Don’t they make gorgeous offspring?

Photography

Nick Tribuno

This morning I deserted my New Jersey brethren and headed south, where wind models called for a midday offshore-swing as opposed to NJ’s 3 PM. My current feeling toward this decision is: indifference. Because it was fucking amazing here, and it was fucking amazing there… with snow (which has its own set of positives and negatives when it coincides with pumping surf).

What I experienced today in Delmarva was as follows: victory-at-sea early on, followed by somewhat clean, but terribly rainy conditions til noon, finishing with the most pristine overhead teepees a surfer could ask for til sundown. There were rights, lefts, and tubes, tubes, tubes. In fact it was tubing so hard that at one point I wished it would stop tubing so hard, but of course it didn’t. If anything it tubed harder.  

I shared this three hour keg-sesh with the likes of Simon Hetrick, Shane Borland, Seth Conboy and Brad Flora, the latter of which extended his streak of devastating injuries by blowing out his knee on a backside air-drop… but not before nabbing one of the better tubes of the day.

In fact, I think everybody in our crew nabbed one of the better tubes of the day. 

John Kersey is a beat from the east.

Photography

Brendan Medairy

It’s difficult to compare the quality of today’s session to those at Newmibia, mainly because one is a grinding sand-point and the other an A-framing beachie. And while both places could be considered world-class for their respective wave types, the spread-outedness of today’s beach break was a welcome blessing after days of fighting both current and crowd. So for that reason, I think today might have been the best of the swell. Maybe. Five days of tubes is making my memory fuzzy.

What’s even crazier is that, forecast-wise, there’s a high likelihood we’ll see better waves over the next two days. While Quinn was a deadbeat daddy of a swell (copulated with Riley, filled her womb with a pod of beautiful brown babies and drifted away without a trace) Riley’s long period energy will continue to pelt the coast for the next couple days.

Shortly we’ll be leaving Delmarva for another part of the coast, which, I kid you not, could be better than both Newmibia and what we scored today. 

This is a truly historic swell.