Pacific City Swell Window
Oregon, USA · part of the Pacific City spot guide
- Swell window (from)
- 210°–330° (SSW–NNW)
- Best direction
- ~270° (W)
- Period sweet spot
- 10–17 s
- Open-ocean height (Hs)
- 2–12 ft
- Resulting faces
- 2–15 ft
Open-ocean vs. the face: the heights on buoys and forecast models are significant wave height (Hs) in deep water. What you ride is the breaking face, which depends on period, direction and this break's bathymetry — that's why the two rows above differ. PierMonkey's spot ratings already do this conversion for you.
The window runs from south-southwest through west to north-northwest, but the most productive direction is west, with west-northwest the money band. Energy arriving from the northwest quadrant is partly blocked and softened by Cape Kiwanda and the headland, so raw north-northwest swell under-performs its buoy reading; west and west-northwest that wrap cleanly to the bank are favoured. It works on both groundswell (around 10-to-17 seconds) and shorter local windswell.
Because the buoy is up-coast at Tillamook Bay and the cape shelters the beach, the buoy height generally over-reads what actually lands cleanly on the bank — read it as an upper bound, not the face height.