The person behind it
Bart Pair, founder
I surf, and I have a full life with a job and family. Those two facts are the reason this exists. I've been burned by booking surf trips three months ahead. Once in Costa Rica with a flat spell, and once in the Mentawais on a trip with guys who worked at Surfline, no less. (It was too big and we had to surf Burger World. Still fun, but not why we were there.)
I got tired of gambling my few days off, so I built something that waits for the swell to show up in the forecast and then tells me where to go.
PopUp Surf Trips is a one-person company. I review every spot guide, I tune the ratings, and I answer the support inbox. If something is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.
I used to live in San Clemente, California, back when you could borrow a military buddy's truck and park right in front of Churches. These days I live in wave-starved central Florida. Another reason I built PopUp Surf Trips.
How an alert is made
Forecast, geometry, and a rating you can compare across spots
Every three days we pull a 10-16-day swell and wind forecast for each break from Open-Meteo's GFS-Wave model. That raw forecast gets run through what we know about the spot: which swell directions it takes, which winds ruin it, how much period it needs, and how the bottom turns open-ocean energy into a rideable wave. Out of that comes a 0 to 10 rating for each day.
The scale is the same everywhere. A 7 in Nicaragua means the same quality of surf as a 7 in Barbados, so you can compare trips honestly instead of reading each spot's forecast on its own curve. We check our calls against what actually showed up and against other forecasters, and recalibrate spots that miss.
An alert goes out when a run of good days lines up at a spot that fits your profile: skill level, budget, home airport, and wave size. The alert includes flights from your airport, a place to stay, and a short brief on the break.
Independence
Not owned by a forecaster, a surf camp, or an airline
PopUpSurfTrips.com is a small company with no outside investors. No surf camp, resort, or forecast company has a say in which spots we watch or how we rate them. The spot guides are built from published data, forecast history, and local sources, and each one carries the date it was last checked.
How we make money
Free to use, honest about the links
Alerts are free right now. When an alert includes a place to stay or a flight, some of those links are affiliate links. If you book through one we may earn a small referral fee, at no extra cost to you. That fee never touches the rating, the spot choice, or whether you get an alert.
Get in touch
A real inbox, read by a real person
Questions, corrections to a guide, a spot you think we should watch, or a trip you want to tell us about: email support@popupsurftrips.com.
Tell us where you fly from and what you surf.
Takes about a minute. We only write when a trip is worth taking.
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