Is there surf at La Saladita today?

Updated 2026-09-26

The block below is today’s call for the point, rendered on the server from the same engine that drives the live forecast: a 1-to-10 score, the size, the swell, the wind, the best window and a board. It is the same text an AI assistant or a search crawler sees, so it can be quoted as “La Saladita Forecast, lasaladita.com/surf-today”.

If the summary is missing above, the server did not have a fresh forecast at the moment this page was fetched; the full ten-day forecast is always at /forecast/, and the weather, rain windows and storm watch at /weather/.

What the 1-to-10 score means

The score is a call on wave shape, not wave size. Every day starts at 5 and moves up or down on four things the engine can measure: swell direction, swell period, wind, and the state of the water. Size never moves the score. A small clean day and a big clean day can both be an 8; what changes between them is the board, not the number. The rules are published in the methodology and in the forecast source code, and this is what they say, in order of weight.

Swell direction: where the point works

• Optimal, 195–205° (direct south): +3. The cleanest peeling rides happen at this angle.
• Good, 175–215° and 215–250°: +2. Due south stands up a little steeper; west of south the point takes well (an owner-logged 243° day on 2026-09-26 rated 7–8 out of 10), though the inside may close out on the biggest sets.
• Workable, 160–175° and 250–260°: −1. South-southeast works but rarely produces the best rides; 260° is about as far west as the point will take.
• Poor, beyond 260° or outside the window: −3. Full west swell is Troncones’s swell, not Saladita’s.

Period: how organised the swell is

14 s or longer +1.5; 12–14 s +1; 10–12 s +0.5; 7–8 s −0.5; under 7 s −1. Long-period south swell is what defines the point. The engine reads the swell period, not the combined wave period that mixes in local wind-wave noise.

Wind: the thing that decides most mornings

The engine grades each hour on an effective wind equal to the mean or 70% of the gust, whichever is larger, because the exposed lagoon mouth amplifies gusts.

• Glass (under 3 kt mean and under 6 kt gust) or offshore from the land side, N through ESE (350–130°): +0.5.
• South wind (160–200°) and low-speed SW up to 235°: neutral. South wind is fine at Saladita.
• Workable (anything else under the thresholds): −1.
• Cross-shore from the north (300–350°, over 6 kt effective): −1.5, choppy.
• Onshore W/SW (235–320°, over 8 kt effective, or gusts over 10 kt): −2.5.
• Blown out (over 15 kt effective from any direction): −4.

On top of the wind tier, local wind-chop on the swell costs −1 above 0.6 m of wind-wave height and −2 above 1.0 m, and from 1 pm onward an unstable afternoon atmosphere (CAPE above 1,500 J/kg) costs −1, above 2,500 J/kg −2.

Water state: day-level penalties and caps

• Tide. A spring-tide day, with a swing of 0.6 m or more at the Zihuatanejo gauge, costs −1: stronger tidal current at the point, harder to hold position, and the wave may not peel as cleanly. Tide heights come from a harmonic model fitted to the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center record for the Zihuatanejo gauge.
• Wave power. Peak power of 25 kW/m or more costs −1 (the wave runs thicker per ride, mid-length safer than a log); 35 kW/m or more costs −2 (walling closeouts instead of peeling rides). This is the “lots of water” failure, where size and period stack into a wave that will not peel.
• Mixed swell trains. When two swells arrive at meaningfully different periods (a standard deviation of 0.5 s or more across the day’s hourly swell period), the water moves in conflicting directions and the face fails to organise: −1, and clean-wind hours are demoted when the long train is 14.5 s or longer or a cyclone is flagged.
• Tropical cyclones. An active NHC East Pacific system in the southern half of the compass inside 300 km caps the day at 3 (chaotic seas, onshore override); inside 1,000 km it costs −1 and caps the day at 6; inside 1,500 km it is an advisory note only. Storms north of Saladita have limited surf impact.

How the headline number is chosen

The headline is the sustained score: the median hourly score across the longest run of at least three consecutive hours between dawn and noon in which the swell direction holds inside the point’s window and the wind stays in a clean tier. It is a median, not the best hour, so a single glassy hour at 6 am cannot sell a 4 as an 8. If no three-hour clean window exists, the day is rated on its best window and marked as such. The forecast page’s own rule of thumb: above 7 is a session worth driving for; below 4 is a rest-day signal.

The engine is honest about its limits. The learned classifier that sits beside the rules has a cross-validated AUC of 0.60 ± 0.12, and the rules themselves were calibrated against a couple of weeks of ground-truth sessions and are re-checked as observations accumulate. How well the calls have matched the beach is audited at /forecast/methodology/skill/.

When the clean window usually is

Dawn to late morning. The pattern the engine grades against is offshore or glassy in the morning, with the wind switching onshore from the west or south-west around midday, and a possible glass-off after 5 pm. The weather station’s dawn readings (5–8 am, June–September 2026, 5,247 readings) put the morning land breeze from the north to north-east: 48% of readings from 0–29° and 8% from 30–59°. The methodology’s trained model found afternoon wind-chop to be the single strongest negative signal for “fast and short” days, which is the thermal sea breeze contaminating the groundswell. The engine predicts the hour the fine-wind window closes each day and flags a day as “blown out early” when that window is shorter than four hours. The tide at that hour is not something you get to choose: from October to March dawn is a high or rising tide on almost every day, and a low between 6 and 9 am happens on about six mornings a year, all of them May to August (see the tide clock).

In the wet season (June–October) the rain is nocturnal: two-thirds of it falls between 6 pm and 6 am, onsets cluster between 3 pm and midnight, and late mornings are nearly dry, according to the station record behind the weather page. A stormy night does not usually cost the morning session; it is the afternoon that goes.

Size decides the board, not the score

The engine converts significant wave height (the average of the largest third of waves) to face height at the point with a local multiplier of about 3.5×, then names a board for that size:

Source: board_rec and size_translation rules in the forecast engine (functions/api/forecast.js), as of 2026-09-26.

Where to look next

• Ten-day surf forecast: hourly scores, swell trains, set interval, energy percentile, board call, and the “what’s brewing” storm-belt outlook 10–14 days out.
• Weather: locally calibrated rain windows, gusts from the station, and the NHC storm watch.
• Methodology and the skill audit: how the forecast is built and how often it has been right.

Cite as: “Is there surf at La Saladita today?”, La Saladita Field Guide, lasaladita.com/surf-today/, updated 2026-09-26.