........and it travels on great circle tracks, which results in long-distance
swell sometimes arriving from directions that seem to be intuitively wrong.
Charts on a gnomonic projection reveal all in this respect. Gnomonic charts
give a very distorted appearance to oceans and land masses but on these charts
great circles are straight lines. For example, SW'ly winds associated with a
major hurricane off the mid-Atlantic coast of the USA will produce a swell that
reaches Cornwall from WNW.


--
Norman Lynagh
Tideswell, Derbyshire
303m a.s.l.
http://peakdistrictweather.org

.. . and of course, you can get a very long great circle route to the north Cornish coast, so the size of the eventual swell hitting the north coast often isn't really subject to a fetch limitation, it's typically duration limited. Summer rarely creates any long duration events.

I know I've mentioned this before, but http://www.amazon.co.uk/Surf-Science.../dp/0906720362 is am excellent book.

Best make the most of Magic Seaweed forecasts, now it's been taken over I fear it's only a matter of time before it becomes much more purely modelled based. That's OK for offshore forecasts, but inshore boy do you need the human input.

Onshore, small & messy now, not looking good for a while http://magicseaweed.com/Live-Sennen-Webcam/65/ It's set to become basically flat.

Graham
Penzance