Mount Maunganui

Best Surf Season (March - May)

The annual journey around the sun is written clearly in the Bay of Plenty swell and wind roses. As summer fades, the subtropical high drifts north and the Southern Ocean storm track slowly reawakens, injecting more southwest and west offshore wind into the system while the sea is still reasonably warm. That makes March through May the sweet spot: average swell heights hold at around 1.2m (4ft), periods remain in the 8.2-8.9s range, and 41 to 48 percent of the time the wind is blowing from the offshore quadrant. The swell directions are still locked primarily into the NNE-NE-ENE-E window that works best on the northeast-facing sandbars at the Mount.