Peñarrubia — local surf knowledge

The wave

Peñarrubia breaks over a rock bottom, at the foot of the cliff, on the coast east of Gijón. Those two features explain almost everything it does: the rock bottom makes the wave reward long periods, and the cliff shelters it from a southerly wind however hard it blows.

The left: long and forgiving, one of the easiest in the area to learn on. It is also the beach's longboard wave.
The right: a good deal more radical than the left, for people with some level.
Type of bottom: rock, not sand. That is why the period counts for more here than at the sandbank beaches.

Size

Heights are given on the scale of the San Lorenzo page, which is the reference every beach in the area is compared against.

Minimum: 0.8 m, and only if the period plays along. At 0.7 m there is nothing to be done, however good the rest is.
Beginners: between 0.8 and 0.9 m.
With some level: 1 to 1.5 m is its good range.
Maximum: 1.5 m. Above that it starts to be too much.

Period

The rock bottom rewards long periods, and this is the variable that most separates a good session from a mediocre one.

Minimum: 9 s.
The good session: between 11 and 14 s. The longer, the better.
At 8 s: only if there is size. With 1.2 m and 8 s it can still be a good day; with 0.8 m and 8 s it is not worth it.

Swell direction

Best: between 287° and 346°, from west-north-west to north-north-west.
A northerly swell: it puts the wave out of shape. At 1 m it can be fine, but it never quite becomes a complete day.
A westerly swell: the same, for the same reason.

Wind

Good: the whole sector running from 102° (east) to 225° (south-west).
Strong southerlies do not affect it. Sitting at the foot of the cliff, the beach is sheltered, so a 30-knot offshore is still a good day — something that at an open beach would already have flattened the wave.
Bad: northerlies.

Tide

It is the most restrictive variable of the beach and the first one to check.

It only works from mid tide down. You surf it from low to mid tide and back again.
At high tide it does not work, whatever the swell is doing.
Dead low is good, it never gets too low.
Neap tides are the best thing that can happen to it: with a small coefficient the tide spends the whole day inside the good band, so you can surf from dawn to dusk. With big coefficients there is only a window while the tide crosses from low to mid.

How it compares with San Lorenzo

Peñarrubia gets practically the same swell report as San Lorenzo, because the two fall on the same point of the forecast grid. All the difference is in how the beach responds:

It asks for more period than San Lorenzo.
Its swell window sits a little further west.
It holds less size at the top end: it is too much at 1.5 m.
And above all, it depends on the tide in a way San Lorenzo does not: at high tide Peñarrubia is not an option.

Put another way: it is a narrow-window beach. It is not good as often as San Lorenzo, but when a low tide, a long period and a metre of north-west swell line up, it is one of the best waves in the area to learn on.