The Swell Czar

Embarking on a surf trip can be emotionally taxing. Even after months of planning, careful quiver consideration, and an obscene amount of money spent on travel, you could still end up skunked. Now imagine if the trip you were planning had no surf forecast or buoys to rely on and involved at least two or three days aboard planes, boats, and automobiles. Oh, and you were committed to sending some of the world’s best surfers alongside a film crew to places they’d never even heard of and vowing them to secrecy—with failure meaning tens of thousands of their sponsors’ dollars down the drain. Sound stressful? Welcome to Surfline’s Maps to Nowhere. 

Charlie Hutcherson, the forecaster Surfline calls to help forecast the unforecastable, was buzzing while showing me an initial photo from an underway Maps trip when I spoke with him during our first video call. “If I get up and go and grab a beer [to celebrate] and sit back down, maybe you’ll know why,” he told me, giddy with the stoke of somebody who’d spent weeks preparing for this very moment. 

For the uninitiated, Maps to Nowhere is a web series in which Surfline sends a handful of O’Neill’s marquee riders on trips to undisclosed and seemingly never-before-surfed locations. If the first season was a success, the second was monumental— culminating in a dramatic finale set against the backdrop of a dredging right-hand sand-bottom point surfed by Soli Bailey, world champ Caity Simmers, and her brother, Timo. To many, Simmers’ performance alone was a high-water mark in women’s surfing, with her footage appearing to break all social media metrics (if that’s how you’re inclined to measure surf-clip success). 

Growing up in Orlando, Hutcherson got his start both forecasting and surfing volatile East Coast hurricanes. As a kid, he jokes, he would clean his whole house on Friday afternoon so his mom wouldn’t have the excuse not to drive him to the beach come the weekend. Later, he figured that a grad-school path in oceanography would get him closer to the ocean and accelerate his swell knowledge in the process. Eventually, he found his way to Surfline through a mutual friend and began working in the forecast-science and editorial department. “I just absorbed information. I knew coming in that [forecasters Kurt Korte and Kevin Wallis] were the best, and they had a 10- to 20-year head start on me,” he said. “So this editorial lane opened up and just gave me the chance to learn about swells, waves, and storms all around the world.” 

It’s at this intersection of content and science where we find Hutcherson—which is why he understands the acute pain the team in the field incurred when, shortly after our first call, the wind on their trip switched unfavorably, throwing the production into a scramble. I caught up with him on a second call a few days later for a debrief.

MF When we spoke last week, you seemed pretty optimistic about how the trip had started. The next day, you emailed me saying that you still hadn’t had a sip of your celebratory beer. What happened? 

CH Before we spoke, I’d gotten a text with some information and a photo from the first wave they had surfed. I actually got some [more] information while we were talking—the winds didn’t stay as favorable as we would have liked for as long as we wanted. The chase was still on. We still had a number of days left on the trip and a couple of swells still coming, so that’s been the focus ever since. 

MF I’m sure it’s tough running support on one of these trips while also balancing your day-to-day forecast duties. 

CH I mean, the trips are pretty all-conconsuming, especially when they’re underway. This was one of the more hands-on and more difficult ones because we were right in the middle of the [location’s] storm track. So, instead of getting somewhere with a swell on the way, we’re there where the swell’s being generated on top of us. We spend months, if not years, in the lead-up on the research of the spot and for the trip, and then it’s full hands-on in trying to give all the information and help we can to try and score like we have on some of these past episodes. The excitement around the trips certainly offsets the extra workload. 

MF Are you pulling all-nighters? 

CH That’s why I was pretty shot out when we last talked. The night before, I was up at midnight and at 4 a.m. to send the teams updates on winds and buoys. Like you saw last week, it’s exciting to get that first picture of a wave that they stumbled upon. 

MF What keeps you motivated when you’re having those sleepless nights? 

CH It’s really just the froth of the score. You spend so much time looking at pictures, looking at videos, imagining what the wave would be like. Just to get to see if everything that you’ve put together is really going to make a spot turn on—that’s what makes all the work worth it. The ability to use all of my science background is also really exciting. It’s about getting an understanding of what makes a spot tick. That’s what the average surfer can do for their trip, too. The more time that you spend understanding and knowing what you want to go after will increase your chances of scoring on that trip. 

MF Where do you even start with trying to line up these trips? 

CH It’s kind of become my job to monitor and know what’s going on globally, as far as storms and swell. [Surfline director of forecasting] Kevin Wallis made a joke and called me the swell czar or a swell dealer. It’s like, “Tell me what you need, and I’ll find the swell that you want.” I see more swells than we can do with Maps, or that I can put on another project. There are some [trips] where we just go to wave-rich zones, and then there are others where we’re actually going after a single, specific wave. Those might be the most fun, because then I just get completely obsessive about learning everything about the wave, watching for that perfect moment, and then hoping that we can get everybody on a plane. [The method] we’ve used is really what I think is the next frontier in forecasting. With [Surfline senior forecast manager, Pacific] Schaler Perry leading, we’ve been able to get a good idea of what’s going to be active six weeks, two months, three months in advance. 

MF It sounds like you have a crystal ball. How do you go about forecasting three months in advance, before the wind even hits the water? 

CH It’s learning to look into climatology. Weather is what we experience on a day-to-day basis. Climatology is the study of the large-scale patterns in the atmosphere that help drive the weather we see. Using climatology, we can get a general idea of where and when storms and swell are likely to be active, and when the surf could be less active, during a season. There’s a reason people say, “Oh, there’s always waves on Super Bowl Sunday.” There may not be waves every year, but a bunch of years, there’s surf. If you can figure out if this year is like some of those past years, there’s a decent chance that you end up hitting swells on those same days. 

MF Could you put a number to the amount of spots that would qualify for the series that the Maps team is monitoring? 

CH As far as Maps goes, right now and with the current trip, we probably had three really focused areas and maybe five potential trips. That’s because [Surfline director of video programming] Graham [Nash] and his team, they’ve got to work with the guide and know who the photographers are, and then [Surfline senior creative video producer] Billy [Watts] has got to work with O’Neill to get the surfers there. So, as far as the season goes, we’ll have a target of an episode within a window, but if I see something jump out at one of these other [spots], then we can also put that into play. 

MF What’s the best feedback from a surfer that you’ve gotten on one of these trips? 

CH The most enjoyable is when they talk about having caught the best wave, or one of the best waves, of their life. To think that you had a hand in putting them in position to get that is one of the most rewarding things about it. 

MF What’s a trip you wish you could have lined up? 

CH There was one that had one of the best storm patterns I’ve seen during our Maps setup, but we just couldn’t pull everybody together for the trip. That one haunted me for a year, until we were able to pull off the trip [in this current season]. 

MF Have you been to, or do you plan on going to, any of the spots that you’ve featured in the series so far? 

CH I haven’t been to any of our spots. There is one that I’d planned or hoped to go to until we got it, and I thought, “Well, maybe I don’t need to travel all the way around for that, because I don’t know if I can do anything with that wave.” [Laughs.] 

MF Over the last two seasons, your trips have been seven for seven. Does that put some pressure on you? 

CH I felt pressure from the beginning. The word “luck” gets tossed out, which bothers me a little bit. If Greg Long paddles out and sits for six hours and catches one wave, and it’s the biggest wave of the day, do you say, “Oh, he got lucky?” No, it’s what he set out to do, and he put himself in place for that to happen. I can’t guarantee how the sand is going to be, or be sure 10 days in advance how the wind is going to be somewhere in the middle of the ocean, but we can give them the best chance for everything to fall into place. 

[The method] we’ve used is really what I think is the next frontier in forecasting. We’ve been able to get a good idea of what’s going to be active six weeks, two months, three months in advance.

MF When you see people who try to find where the Maps waves are and post them online, are they missing the point of what the project is? 

CH Is it any different than any other comments section? [Laughs.] I’d say it’s akin to spoiling a movie while you’re standing in line. What’s your real point? What’s your goal if you want to be the first to comment on where a location is? 

MF Without giving too much away, what are some under-explored regions in surfing and surf forecasting that you think people are overlooking? 

CH If you want to find uncrowded or uncharted waves, the more remote, the more travel it takes to get there, or the more challenging the climate—cold or heat—the greater chance you have of being alone. One dangling teaser I will toss out there is it’s not always the strongest or biggest storms that send the best swells or send waves to all spots. Some spots may come from winds that don’t necessarily catch your eye. 

MF What are you looking forward to people seeing in the new season? 

CH To see if we can match the right that Caity, Soli, and Timo surf in Season 2, Episode 3. 

MF Do you feel confident? 

CH We’re still searching. 

MF If you were planning a Maps to Nowhere trip with yourself in mind, what would your ideal setup be? 

CH We have a number of waves that we’ve come across that are not quite Maps caliber. There’s one rivermouth point that we’ve looked at that very much interests me. It’s not big, it’s just a really fast sand point. 

MF Is it a right or left? 

CH It’s a right. If I had to pick any wave, it would be a pointbreak, head high to a few feet overhead, not tropical, but maybe in a kind of temperate zone. 

MF Sounds like your employers owe you a trip. 

CH [Laughs.] I joke around about trying to hop on one. The help that I could give while being right there in person, I think, would be invaluable. So far, nobody’s bitten, but I keep tossing that lure out.