Surfing Waves

I am kinda confused about wave height.
How do must forecasts and reports judge wave height,by the face or by the back of the wave and is the back of the wave the hawaian style measurement. Also sometimes it says 4-6ft and in brackets 2metres, whats up wth that is that the swell height

I'm confused.

scuba steve wrote:I am kinda confused about wave height.

It causes much confusion!!

scuba steve wrote:How do must forecasts and reports judge wave height,by the face or by the back of the wave and is the back of the wave the hawaian style measurement.

Depends which site you're looking at but assuming you're looking at UK websites, it'll generally mean the face of the wave. The exception here though is magicseaweed which is giving you the offshore swell height so you need to know what happens at the beach to be able to know how bigs its actually going to be.

scuba steve wrote:Also sometimes it says 4-6ft and in brackets 2metres, whats up wth that is that the swell height

Thats the same measurement in feet and then in metres.

I thought 2 metres was like 7foot

Think about it bro its 3 feet for every one meter. So thats 6 feet, for two meters (roughly). i think we all learned that in 3rd grade just messin

yeh thanx man i was just getting confused because there are roughly 3.28 feet per metre so two metres is about 6.56 feet going above the 4-6ft range so i thought it might just be the swell height.
tryin to regain my dignity here.

i guess a waves a wave any way

Any 1 who can measure a wave from the back has missed that wave .
When chatting to mates about a recent session i normally say something like faces were knee/waist/shoulder/head and they can then get a good mental picture of the actual size as im normally stood next to them.
Ive been told though that to measure true wave height you must divide face height by 1.3

Always cracks me up when im haveing a few jars and some penis strolls up to the bar and anounces rather loudly that he's just had such & such at a solid 6 to 8ft, when youve just surfed the same place that was barely touching 4ft on set waves -jokers!

yeah, waves allways look bigger when you looking down about to take off or looking up as one is about to crash onto you, i think thats a lot of why beginners often exaggerate the size, also "head high" etc can be deceptive as half way through a bottom turn on the flats with knees bent your head is only a couple of feet from the surface and that can make judging wve size innaccurate too.
You get a feel for wave size as you experience different sizes and then your reports get more accurate. Having said that a day that was 4ft can often become 5-6ft a few hours later when your telling people who werent there, and can even add a couple more feet when your telling visitors about how good it was yesterday.

discussion was also had here:

https://surfing-waves.com/forum/view ... hp?p=48453

but 4-6ft equals 1-2m, for quick shorthand.