A wave is only “good” relative to who is paddling out.

I'm a Canadian surfer, ten-plus years in and still trying to get good at it. In 2025 I quit my job to travel and surf, and I've since been right around the world once — a mix of surf camps and turning up at spots I knew almost nothing about.

Both halves of that were harder than they needed to be. Planning each leg meant hours of research across forums, old blog posts and forecast sites that all said a break was “world-class” without ever saying who it was world-class for. And the camps I stayed at were genuinely mixed — some excellent, some nothing like the way they described themselves.

So I built this, and its sister site for camps. Surf Scout grades every spot from 1 to 7 on the same scale it grades surfers on, so you can tell whether a place is within your level before you plan a trip around it — and what it asks of you when it isn't.

Every spot is assembled from sources I write down one field at a time: what kind of break it is, which way it peels, the swell and tide it wants, its season, and what can hurt you there. Each fact records where it came from, and the site computes how confident to be from how many genuinely independent sources agree. I don't type that confidence in by hand — three sites republishing one dataset counts once, not three times.

Two rules I apply myself, every time:

Where sources disagree about difficulty, I take the harder reading. Over-calling a wave disappoints someone. Under-calling it puts a beginner on a reef. Those are not equivalent mistakes, so I don't average them.

A spot only gets a map pin when two independent maps agree where it is. A wrong pin is invisible — it just quietly points at the wrong headland — so when I can't confirm a location, the spot goes up without one or doesn't go up at all.

How the 1–7 scale works

I haven't surfed most of the breaks on this site. Where I have, the spot says so. Everywhere else this is researched and cross-checked rather than reported from the water, and I'd rather tell you that than imply a familiarity I don't have.

You'll find gaps, and they're deliberate. Some spots have no photograph, because no freely licensed photo exists that is actually of that break — and a photo of the beach next door is worse than none. Some have no map pin, for the reason above. A blank is recoverable. A confident guess that looks like a fact is not.

Conditions and seasonality come from public ocean models. They can tell you how often rideable swell is in the water in a given month; they cannot see wind, tide, sandbanks or crowds, and they are never a live surf report. Where the site computes something rather than judging it, it says so.

It isn't. There are no ads, no affiliate commissions, no paid placement and no way to pay for a better grade — on this site or the camps one. Nothing here has ever earned a commission on anything.

If that ever changes, you'll see it on the page carrying the link, right next to the link itself, before it earns a penny — not only buried on this page. And it still won't move a grade.