Both scanned figures, warped onto the map. Pins follow the chart’s own numbering while it’s shown, so they match the red arrows.
Significant wave height from the CDIP/SIO SoCal swell model, on a 0.01° grid — about a kilometre, so it reads at peninsula scale rather than break scale. The scale adjusts to the day.
Wind near the ground, drawn as drifting particles and shaded by
speed. A separate forecast from Open-Meteo,
fetched only while this is on. The peninsula splits the wind — what is offshore
on one side is onshore on the other.
A compass over the break that is open, once you are zoomed in far enough for it to mean something. The shaded sector is the swell direction the 2003 guide says that break wants; the blue cone is where the swell offshore is coming from right now, longer for bigger and narrower for cleaner. The tick on the rim is the way the break faces.
Off keeps the map still while you step through breaks with the arrow keys or pick one from the list.
Only while zoomed out. Once you are close enough to read the break, tapping a pin leaves the map where it is.
Safari cannot open that dialog for a page, so it is two taps:
Tap in Safari’s bottom bar
Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen
It then opens without Safari’s chrome, which is the only way to get full screen on an iPhone.
Keyboard shortcuts
About this map
musky smell of found surf
cliff’s amber dirt as below
they ebb and begin
— finding surf, the site’s index page, 2003
Surf maps of Palos Verdes, California, built from two PDFs — a PV surf-spot guide saved from a GeoCities page in 2003 — describing 64 breaks running from Rat Beach in Torrance, around the peninsula, to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro. Each PDF carries a scanned NOAA chart with numbered red arrows pointing at every break.
How the pins were placed
Spot names and descriptions were extracted from the PDF text layer.
The red arrows were isolated from the chart rasters by colour, and each arrowhead located.
Each chart's waterline was traced and registered against the present-day OpenStreetMap coastline, giving a transform from chart pixels to latitude/longitude.
Every arrowhead was pushed through that transform.
Figure 2 is drawn at roughly half the scale of Figure 1, and its arrowheads land much further out to sea — a median 246 m against 78 m. South-side pins are therefore pulled in toward the shore by a factor of 0.32, so both halves of the map sit at the same median distance from the beach. Scaling rather than subtracting a fixed distance keeps the spacing the author drew and never crowds a pin onto the beach. The untouched arrowhead position is kept alongside each spot.
A very small number of pins are corrected by hand where local knowledge beats the 2003 arrow — currently one, Wallies Left, which the chart places outside and north of Wallies when it is in fact inside the cove and south of it. Those cards say so.
Accuracy — read this before paddling out
Pins are approximate, to roughly 100 yards. Coastline registration lands within about 15 m on the north chart and 100 m on the south; reading each arrowhead adds 20–45 m. Where the two charts overlap, their coastlines agree with each other to about 74 m. The dominant error is the original author's own felt-tip arrows, drawn freehand on a screenshot. Treat a pin as “that reef, that cove” — not a GPS mark.
The descriptions are one surfer's opinion from 2003 and are reproduced verbatim, including the spot names they used. Reefs shift, access changes, and several of these breaks are genuinely dangerous. Some are also fiercely localised — the guide says so itself.
Keyboard
←↑K
previous break along the coast
→↓J
next break along the coast
Enter
zoom in on the break you are on, as tapping its pin does
1–64
open that break by its number
Esc
close the break card
M
show or hide the break list
R
recentre on every break
I
about this map
?
just these shortcuts
L
show where you are, and how far each break is
U
refresh every break’s conditions
C
CDIP swell overlay
W
wind animation
B
show only breaks that might be working
P
show only breaks that are probably working
Y
every buoy’s reading in one panel
D
the degree ring over the break you are reading
O
the original 2003 chart overlays
V
move the map when navigating
Z
zoom in when tapping a pin
H
add to home screen, where the browser allows it
From the guide itself
Your location
Only when you press .
It stays on your device: this site never stores it or sends it anywhere, and it is
forgotten when you turn it off or leave. Like any online map, the imagery for
whatever area is on screen is downloaded from the tile provider.
The thumb on each card is a guess, not a forecast.
Size comes from the
CDIP MOP
nearshore model, which predicts every 60–100 m along the coast with
refraction and island sheltering already solved for, so each break reads its own
stretch of water. It is judged on the swell in the spectrum rather than the total
height — short-period windswell counts toward the number and rides nothing.
Direction is taken separately, from open water clear of the
headland, because “a west or NW swell” describes where a swell came
from rather than how it arrives after the point bends it. It is weighed against
what the guide says the break wants — including the notes at the head of each
figure, which most entries rely on instead of repeating: Figure 1’s
breaks work on W–NW except as noted, Figure 2’s pick up
S–SE, and Catalina blocks most SW from the south side. The few Figure 2
spots that are really on the west side are found by which way their coast faces.
Water temperature is weighted from CDIP’s three buoys around
the peninsula — Santa Monica Bay, San Pedro and Long Beach Channel —
leaning on whichever is nearest. There is no sensor on the peninsula
itself; the nearest is 16 km out, which is what the tilde is for. Tap a buoy
for its own exact reading.
Tide comes from
NOAA station 9410660
at San Pedro, as a fraction of the day’s own range, and only counts where the
guide names a tide.
Three states, because a coastal model and one surfer’s adjectives do not
support anything finer. One thing is left as prose rather than arithmetic: the
guide says the further south-east you go the better a spot picks up south swell,
which is a tendency, not a threshold. Look at the water.
Sources
The guide itself, as saved in 2003: pvnorth.pdf — North to West PV (30 breaks) pvsouth.pdf — West to South PV (34 breaks)
Waves and sea temperature — the
Coastal Data Information Program
(CDIP): the MOP nearshore model, the SoCal swell-model overlay, and the
Santa Monica Bay, San Pedro and Long Beach Channel buoys.
Data furnished by the Coastal Data Information Program (CDIP),
Integrative Oceanography Division, operated by the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the
California Department of Parks and Recreation.