Getting Started

Reaching Burningswell

You use Burningswell through its web application — the forecast map, the per-spot pages, and your account all live in the browser (see The Web Application). Reaching that page is all a surfer needs to start reading forecasts; creating an account lets you follow spots and log your sessions.

Your first forecast

Open the web application and go to the forecast map. Zoomed out you see numbered bubbles counting the spots in each part of the world; zoom in and they resolve into individual markers. Each marker is a spot — a named break that Burningswell tracks. Choose a spot you know and open its page to read the forecast: the swell and its direction, the wind, and the tide, and how they develop over the hours and days ahead.

Forecasts cover the spots Burningswell tracks, so the quickest start is to look up a break you already surf: type its name into the search in the page header — on a phone, the one on the home page — or browse the places that hold it, from a continent down to a region (see The Web Application). See Forecasts and Spots, for what each part of a forecast means and how to follow the spots you care about.