Pipe Pro Surf Forecast According To John John Florence
The waiting period of the Pipe Pro, the first event of the 2024 WSL Championship Tour season, gets underway tomorrow, and two-time world champ and one of the most accomplished Pipe surfers on tour, John John Florence, just offered his outlook on the surf forecast. He's optimistic the event is going to see plenty of waves, but getting a break from the wind is going to be the trick.
"It looks like there's a lot of swell in the water coming," shares Florence. "It's just the winds are a little bit funky."
"I think the first day of the comp looks like southwest wind, then it looks like there's starts to be more northerly swells," he continues. "But for the first day the swell actually looks pretty nice ... then it looks like there could be a couple days at the end of the waiting period."
With the potential for both west and northwest swells in the water, as well as the wind outlooks, it appears the first few days of the Pipe Pro are likely to be a wait and see kind of thing. It's looking like there are definitely some windows for solid surf out there, but getting all the conditions to align is going to be the trick. Even a surfer with as much experience on the North Shore as Florence wasn't quite sure what to make of it.
"I think it could be really, really good, or just horrible," Florence surmises in the end.
The new Championship Tour season is finally at hand and the first call for the Pipe Pro will be the morning of Monday, January 28.
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With more than 25 years of writing about surfing, the ocean and action sports, Jake Howard continues to share stories, profiles and issues that shape the surfing world. One of the premier subject-matter experts in the field today, he's savvy in the ways of print, digital and social media, his breadth of work is expansive. Getting his start writing Surfline surf reports and recording the phone reports for 976-SURF in the late '90s, Jake served as the managing editor for Surfer Magazine in the early 2000s before moving on to launch RedBullSurfing.com and cover surfing for ESPN and the X Games. Over the years, Jake has also enjoyed time behind the edit desk at The Surfer's Journal, as well as the World Surf League, where he worked as the Senior Editor for a number of years. Beyond producing editorial content, Jake has served as a digital marketer and copywriter for iconic surf brands such as Quiksilver, Roxy and Rip Curl. Writing thousands of pages of copy for Surfline, he has deep SEO experience as well. The surf columnist for the San Clemente Times, Jake continues to dedicate himself to the culture and history of the sport through his involvement with the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente.