We knew Hurricane Season 2024 was going to be a wild ride on account of record warm water temps, and it’s now proving to be an extremely strange season for the Atlantic.
First, you had Hurricane Beryl, which broke all sorts of early season records, a Cat 5 that lived from June into July, far earlier than we ever see storms of that magnitude. Everyone from the Bay of Campeche to the Bay of Fundy kind of strapped in for what looked to be a crazy summer. Then came the dust – the Saharan dust that had everyone scratching their heads at how quiet it got. Debby and Ernesto came through into late July and early August, both wave makers but not deadly, the kind of storms we love to see.
That’s when things got weirder than a director’s cut of a Tarantino movie. For three weeks at the historical peak of hurricane season, the seas went quiet. This was the first time in 50 years that the Atlantic Basin failed to produce anything in that time frame. And this in a year that the scientists were telling us would be hyperactive.
The machine turned back on by late September with a flurry of storms that weren’t really wave-makers for most. Meanwhile, the East Coast proper had low pressure stuck by a blocking high, sending surf of varying degrees of quality. Florida had about a week of love and the Outer Banks went ballistic when the wind was right, as a few more stilted Rodanthe houses fell into the drink.
Related: Hurricane Helene Devastates Parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee
The sad legacy of ‘Cane Season 2024 unfortunately will be Hurricane Helene, which intensified rapidly in the Gulf and struck the Big Bend of Florida with brutal fury. Not only did it swamp the coastal region, but it brought historic rains to the Appalachian Mountains, specifically Tennessee and Western, North Carolina. The relief efforts by the surfing brother/sisterhood are already underway and we will keep you posted next week on how you can best help. It will be a long road ahead for the mountain folk.
And now, we have Kirk, a beastly system, but fortunately a “fish storm” as they are called, not coming toward the East Coast (though Western Europe may want to hold onto their green wine and pastries.) With top sustained winds at 140 mph and a massive girth, this one should be just a swell event for the US, the kind with no wet sheetrock.
This won’t be a huge swell on account of the fact that Kirk never gets very close. But its October and the weather on the East Coast is doing that amazing thing your idiot cousin from New Jersey never shuts up about. Kirk will be throwing swell hundreds of miles. Frontrunners arrive in the Outer Banks and Florida by Sunday, filling in for the rest of the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic and then New England and Nova Scotia by Monday. Again, probably overhead for the best spots but solid throughout. It’s worth noting that
Kirk swell drops off on Tuesday, but depending on the track, there should be a few days of waves. Tropical Storm Leslie formed off the coast of Africa on Wednesday and should keep a little something in the water through late week.
Meteorologists are basically calling for October to be this year’s September. The water is still steamy and later season storms tend to form in the Gulf and off the Southeast as opposed to the more traditional Cape Verde storms.
While everything points to more activity, this season keeps throwing curves.