Storm Beachcombing: What Winter Swell Plus a Minus Tide Uncovers

The best beachcombing of the year comes on the first calm daylight low after a winter blow: the swell restocks the wrack line and strips sand off the gravel, and a minus tide lets you walk the fresh cut. In winter 2026-27, Port Orford (NOAA station 9431647) gets 23 daylight minus tides in October through December against 12 at La Push (9442396), and at both stations the season's five lowest daylight windows land at dusk, between 5:12 and 6:35 PM.

What does winter swell actually do to a beach?

It rebuilds the whole profile. The National Park Service describes the cycle plainly: high-energy waves "remove sediment from the berm, which is stored offshore in bars parallel to the shoreline in a configuration described as the 'bar,' 'storm,' or 'winter' profile." The sand isn't gone; it's parked offshore until calmer summer waves walk it back. What a big blow leaves onshore is a lower, flatter beach with its underlayer showing: cobble, gravel, shell hash.

That underlayer is the point. Travel Oregon's agate-hunting guide says some argue the best time to find agates is "when the beaches are scoured by the wind in winter, the loss of sand revealing layers of rocks anytime from December to March." The storm does the excavation for free. The tide decides whether you get to inspect the work, and the sun decides whether you can see it. Daylight windows thin out sharply after August at both stations below, which is why the few good winter ones are worth planning around.

Where do the finds land?

Two elevations, two different searches.

High on the beach: the storm wrack line. Wrack is the flotsam that receding tides strand — kelp, seagrass, shells, small sticks — and storms fatten it. COASST, the University of Washington's coastal survey program, notes that "stormy weather can create an especially dense wrack line because wave action dislodges more seaweed and deposits the free fronds high on the beach," and that small debris concentrates in the wrack zone. Anything that floats ends up here. The wrack pays at half tide; it does not need a minus low.

Low on the beach: the gravel beds. These need the storm and the tide, because the lowest of the newly exposed beds only go dry on a good low. This is where minus-tide arithmetic earns its keep. The spots tracked at Port Orford include Battle Rock Beach and, helpfully explicit, Agate Beach; at La Push they're Rialto Beach's Hole-in-the-Wall stretch, Second Beach, and Third Beach.

What about glass floats?

The genre's great legend, so label it honestly. The documented part: Oregon beachcombers really did find blown-glass Japanese fishing floats in "gleaming shades of green and blue" that, per Lincoln City's history of the tradition, "were used to float fishing nets and ranged in size from two inches to two feet." The lore part: that every hard winter westerly ferries a fresh batch across to whoever walks the beach at first light. Treat it as lore; finding an original is not something to plan a trip around. Lincoln City has effectively conceded the point: since the 1999-2000 season its Finders Keepers program has seeded artist-blown floats — more than 3,000 a year along seven miles of shore — for visitors to keep, placed above the high-tide line, the one treasure here that needs no tide table.

When are the 2026-27 winter daylight windows?

Winter tides here don't lack depth; they lack light. From October through December 2026, La Push logs 63 lows below +1 ft and Port Orford 68 — nearly identical raw material. The daylight conversion is not close:

Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA station 9442396 (La Push) and 9431647 (Port Orford) predictions.

Port Orford converts almost twice as often, and December is the starkest month: La Push posts 18 lows below +1 ft and turns only 4 into daylight minus tides, while Port Orford posts 22 and turns 9. Some of that is the luck of the harmonic draw, but the structural share is latitude. La Push sits at 47.9°N, Port Orford at 42.7°N, and five degrees buys noticeably more December afternoon before the light quits.

Here are the two stations' five lowest daylight-window lows for the king-tide season (October 2026 through March 2027), ranked together by depth:

Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA station 9442396 and 9431647 predictions; windows and scores per the Tidewindow pipeline.

Every row lands between 5:12 and 6:35 PM. Winter minus tides on this coast are dusk events, so read the daylight column hard: in nine of these ten windows the light runs out before the water does. La Push on Dec 23 is the honest extreme — the window opens at 3:50 PM with 39 daylight minutes, which puts last light near 4:29 PM, an hour and a half before the 6:03 PM low. You comb the falling tide, not the bottom of it. The exception is Port Orford on Jan 21, 2027: a window opening at 2:45 PM with 152 daylight minutes holds the light until about 5:17 PM, five minutes past the 5:12 PM low. It is the only one of these ten windows that serves the actual low in daylight, and it takes the best score of the ten, 76. The latitude tax shows up here too: La Push's five windows hold 270 daylight minutes combined, Port Orford's 490.

For calibration, La Push's deepest daylight low of 2026 is a summer one: −2.996 ft on Jul 14 at 7:15 AM, scored 90. None of winter's ten deepest daylight windows clears 76. The Tide Window Finder keeps these ranked as the season approaches, the Trip Picker will chain the consecutive days around Dec 22-24, and the 2026-27 king tides page covers the high-water end of these same spring-tide cycles.

What do NWS and NPS say about winter surf?

Nothing in this section is worth improvising, so it is mostly quotation. The National Weather Service on sneaker waves: they are "potentially deadly waves that surge further up the beach than expected, overtaking the unaware," and they "can run up the beach by at least 150 feet (45 meters) into the dry beach." The lull is the trap: "There can be 10 to 20 minutes of small waves right before a sneaker wave strikes." The NWS instruction is specific: "Watch the ocean for at least 20 minutes. Study its wave patterns. Get a feel for the pattern of the waves before relaxing on the beach or engaging in recreational activities."

Note that the wrack line you came to search sits within that 150-foot run-up, and a post-storm beach is newly floored with drift logs. NWS again: "A single sneaker wave can lift and roll these logs further up the beach, as well as roll them back down the beach, knocking over or pinning unsuspecting beachgoers." Stay off the logs. And Olympic National Park's standing rule for the coast that includes La Push's beaches: "Wherever you go along the coast, always carry a tide table and know how to use it!"

The recipe: let the blow pass, take the first calm daylight window, work the high wrack early, and be on the low gravel by the arrive-by time in the table. In winter the clock that ends the search is usually the sun, not the flood. The scoring formulas live on the methodology page.