I was talking with a friend of mine a couple days ago about a surf meet she was going to be in…. of all places Malibu.

The meet will be toward the end of June after the official first day of summer. Malibu surf events have to be in summer or at least during the calendar year when south swells are generated because Malibu is a south swell surf spot. South swells typically run from April through October. Usually you’ll see the first south swell in California each year sometime in April and typically the last south swell sometime in October. That is the season for them though an off season south swell can happen, and does from time to time.

The thing about south swells is they can have very inconsistent set intervals. Like 3 or 4 wave sets 5 or 10 minuets apart. And that’s what we got to talking about with Donna, my friend entered in the surf event at Malibu.

When you have a 15min. 6 man heat, that’s the event heat criteria, during a south swell that has inconsistent surf what are you chances of getting a couple set waves that will give you the opportunity to score enough points to advance to another heat? So, just for fun let’s say when the first heat that Donna is in there are 3 sets of 4 waves in each set. That’s 12 waves for 6 people to choose from. Let’s say it just so happens that each contestant in the heat gets 2 of the 12 waves during the 15 minutes allotted for the heat.

Fair enough, each contestant gets 2 waves for the judges to decide how each wave ridden will be scored.  That’s not much to go on for any of the contestants to have a chance at advancing to the next round of the event. If all the contestants in the heat are pretty equal in ability I believe the math comes out to be something like a 16% chance that any one of the contestants will have the top score of the 6 contestants. With each of the other riders falling in behind that top score, most likely in some random order. As well, which ever contestant getting the top score is random too. Keep in mind that there is some sort of priority rule for even getting one of the waves during the heat.

Ok, so what’s the point of all this? To me the point would be you enter the contest for what ever the entrance fee is for the opportunity to surf  Malibu for 15 minutes with only 6 other people in the water. And maybe you get to advance to another heat for another opportunity. But you don’t know ahead of time if there will be any surf and what the conditions will be like at the time of the heats you get in.

How ‘bout if you’re going to pay to surf with a small group of people just head out to a wave pool instead.

D.R.

Malibu one day this week with a south swell in the water. About 4 or 5 waves sets 5 plus minutes apart. What are the chances that any one of the people in the water will get one of those set waves.