Surf Search & Photos – The Wairarapa, New Zealand

A lot of the time, good waves around Wellington in New Zealand are hard to come by. But if you are prepared to hit the road & do a little searching, you can certainly score some great waves.

I began watching the swell forecast earlier in the week, & things were looking promising with a fairly intense low heading north off the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Earlier forecasts were for 3-4m swells, but by the time the weekend came around the forecast was downgraded to 2.5m swells. The decision was to either stay in Wellington & hope for waves at Lyall Bay, or head on over to the Wairarapa & try & score much bigger & better surf.

Saturday morning came, & after a early morning check of Lyall, it was clear that I’d be better off heading over the hill to the Wairarapa. I packed the car ready for anything, & started off on the drive that would take just over 2 hours to the first surf break I was going to check out. The wind was blowing quite strongly from the NW when I got there, so I shot some photos & then headed on to the east coast where I knew it would be more protected. As I arrived on the east coast, I knew I had made the right decision. There were a only handful of guys out, & the waves on the point were pretty clean & a good 4 foot plus on the sets.

I ended up surfing a few breaks around that area over the two days, & I shot a heap of photos & some video too. Below is a slide show of just 28 of the photos I shot. You can watch the slide show & click on the photos to be taken to a larger version of it, of you can click here to go to the gallery. I’ll be definitely heading back that way next time there’s swell…

Surf Search Wairarapa | 3-4th July 2010 – Images by Mark Gee

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 9:45 pm and is filed under photos | places, photos | surfing, photos | travel and tagged with beach, late afternoon light, mountains, new zealand, ocean, photos, snow, sunset, surf, surfing, the golden hour, travel, Wairarapa, waves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.