I Miss 44025

Buoy 44025 sits in the Atlantic 33 nautical miles south of Islip. Photo: NOAA

If there’s one tool I use and depend on the most to check how the waves are, it’s NDBC buoy station 44025. The National Data Buoy Center has over 1000 buoys in the open waters across the globe and the one that has become a dear friend of mine and a permanent bookmark on my computer since as long as I can remember stopped sending data and hasn’t been heard from in over a week.

If you’re familiar with 44025 or any NDBC buoy off the coast, you’ll know that buoy’s like 44025 offer important info including wind speed, wind direction, wave height, wave direction, swell height, water temps, and much more.  If you know how to read the numbers you can get a pretty good idea about how the waves are at your local break. Even with the recent advances in the beach cams, I still go to 44025 to tell me what the conditions are.

The shittiest part about 44025 going down is that it’s the time of the year when we start seeing more waves. It could have stopped working a few months ago when we were stuck in the early summer flat spells and it wouldn’t have been that bad. Not only that, but it’s anyone’s guess on when the NBDC will find the time to head out an fix it. Going by the maintenance report it could be as earlier as this month or as late as who knows.

A ton of surfers on Long Island depend on this guy and it’s going to be a tough next couple of months if it doesn’t get fixed. How am I supposed to know when our first decent hurricane swell starts filling in if it’s the middle of the night? Maybe we can start some kind of petition to get the NDBC to fix it sooner than later.

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