The wave buoy about twelve miles east northeast of the St. Augustine Inlet printed seas of 3.0 feet at 1:56 Saturday morning, at a peak period of seven seconds. Half an hour later its wave summary took that sea apart. The wind wave in it stands at 2.6 feet at 7.1 seconds out of the east. Under that, a swell of 0.7 feet at 12.5 seconds, also out of the east.

Those are two different waves in the same three feet of water, and the buoy is publishing them separately. The wind wave is what the wind on this coast is making now. The swell at 12.5 seconds was made somewhere else.

Three days ago this was a different ocean. The same buoy printed 6.9 feet at seven seconds at 1:26 Wednesday morning, with the swell under it at 0.7 feet and 10.5 seconds. Three small craft advisories covered the run from Altamaha Sound to Flagler Beach until five o’clock Thursday morning, and a rip current statement covered coastal Nassau, Duval, Flagler and both St. Johns zones until five on Friday. The call for active alerts across all eleven marine and coastal zones came back empty on Saturday morning. Nothing is in force.

The coastal waters forecast issued at 2:26 Saturday morning keeps the long band in the water. For Sunday it gives the wave detail in two parts, east two feet at seven seconds and east two feet at eleven seconds. Saturday runs northeast five to ten knots, going east ten to fifteen in the afternoon, with seas of two to three feet.

What is in the surf, and when it turns

The surf zone forecast issued at one minute past five Friday afternoon gives Saturday a surf height of two to three feet, a moderate rip current risk and northeast winds of five to ten miles an hour. Surf height is the breaker at the sand, and it is a different quantity from the buoy’s significant wave height twelve miles out and from the forecast seas across a marine zone. The three do not agree and are not meant to.

The turn is Wednesday, and the forecasters have put it in writing. The synopsis says strong high pressure building over southeastern Canada and New England toward the middle of next week will wedge down the southeastern seaboard, bringing a surge of northeasterly winds and small craft advisory conditions beginning later Wednesday and continuing through the late part of the week. The Wednesday block gives northeast winds of 15 to 20 knots and seas of three to five feet, occasionally to six. The same product put the west wall of the Gulf Stream at 58 nautical miles east of St. Augustine Beach as of Thursday at 0000 UTC, and 50 nautical miles east of Flagler Beach.

Three buoys and two and a half degrees

The National Data Buoy Center prints its own Fahrenheit for the station off this county, and at 1:56 a.m. it read 82.4 degrees. The two ends of the run publish in Celsius. Off Fernandina Beach at the north end, station 41112 read 28.9 degrees at the same minute. Off Ponce de Leon Inlet at the south end, station 41070 read 27.4 degrees at 2:03. That is roughly 84 degrees at the top of the run and roughly 81 at the bottom, and the warmer water is the northern one again. Both buoys had 0.8 metres of wave height under them.

The tide gauge at the Mayport bar pilots dock, thirty miles north in the mouth of the St. Johns, read 83.5 degrees at 2:48 a.m. That call asks for english units, so the Fahrenheit is the custodian’s. It is river mouth water and it is not ocean water and it is not the Matanzas.

Nobody publishes an observed water temperature in the St. Augustine Inlet, in the Matanzas, or at St. Augustine Beach. The gauge that stood at the beach was established in 1992 and removed in 2004. The nearest instruments in the water are the buoy twelve miles out and the gauge at Mayport.

Saturday’s tide

The predictions for St. Augustine Beach give a high at 2:41 Saturday morning at 3.8 feet on mean lower low water, a low at 8:51 in the morning at 1.3 feet, a high at 3:18 in the afternoon at 4.7 feet, and a low at 9:48 in the evening at 1.6 feet.

The station’s own datum sheet sets NAVD88 3.13 feet below mean lower low water, on the 1983 to 2001 epoch, accepted in December 2009. On that datum the afternoon high stands at about 1.6 feet and the evening low sits about 1.6 feet below it. Those are harmonic predictions. They carry no wind, no rain and no surge, and there is an east wind of ten to fifteen knots forecast across the afternoon that they know nothing about.

Nothing opens or closes today. The next date that changes what anybody may keep is Oct. 15, twenty six days out, when flounder closes through Nov. 30 and stone crab opens. Hogfish runs on this coast until Oct. 31. Atlantic gag grouper has been closed since Aug. 2, and the open gag season advertised at the top of the state’s grouper page is the Gulf one.

No operation on this run of coast published a dated catch report, so there is nothing here about what anybody caught.