- window
- Work the morning: after midday a shifty wind slides down the slope, the bar on Vatses beach opens and people arrive both by road and by sea. June and early autumn are the quietest months. The track is dirt, so you do not want to drive back in the dark — and night hunting in Greece is banned anyway.
- tide
- You can leave the level out of your planning — it is a toy here. The sea's memory decides a lot more: after a southerly blow the surge keeps working the shallows for another day and the murk stays. With settled northerlies, though, surface water is pushed off the coast and cold water rises along the drop — which is why this side clears up during meltemi.
- shelter
- South-west coast: mountain at your back, nothing ahead of you all the way to the horizon. The ridge kills the northerly so thoroughly that at the height of the meltemi it is nearly calm along the rocks. But anything arriving from the south or south-west rolls in without a single obstacle, and then the bay is out completely.
- conditions
- The perfect day here is a hard northerly or north-easterly: the island holds the wind, the water over the reef stands still and you see to the bottom. On southerly swell do not try it even when light — the shore is steep, the exit over rock turns nasty, and at twenty metres it surges and clouds.
Astypalaia spearfishing forecast — wind, swell, visibility & live cameras
Today — right on the edge — wave, wind and visibility.
Sources: IPMA · buoys · Copernicus · Sentinel-2 — high confidence · data 05:14
Sources & confidence
- Sources
- IPMA · NDBC & IH buoys · Copernicus Marine · Sentinel-2
- Method
- spearo sea-state engine: 6-model consensus + satellite clarity (ZSD) + buoy-bias checks
- Freshness
- Re-read every hour, per coast
Compiled by the spearo sea-state engine · How it works →
The verdict comes from seven water factors and hard safety gates — not ten tabs. Go or stay.
How we score the water
Our own model
Our own forecast engine — not a third-party widget. It weighs these water factors into one go-or-stay verdict for this coast; the 0–10 dial is that verdict, read out as a number.
- Swell & wave memory
- Height, period and direction of the swell, plus the wake of recent storms — an old storm still stirs the water, and the engine remembers.
- Wind & gusts
- Speed and gusts, hour by hour — wind speed and an onshore push chop the surface and cut visibility.
- Tide phase
- Timing and range of the tide, calibrated per coast — big spring tides pull the verdict toward caution.
- Water temperature
- Sea-surface temperature — sharply cold water vetoes a green verdict.
- Currents & outflow
- Direction and drift of the current — it pushes you, and it drags turbid coastal water across where you dive.
- Rain runoff & air clarity
- Rain muddies the water inshore through land runoff, while fog and haze cut visibility at the surface.
- Coast shape & exposure
- How the coast faces the swell — a sheltered cove keeps the water clean; an exposed, head-on point takes a penalty.
Safety gates
- Thunderstorm forecast — an instant red, no exceptions.
- An official warning (MeteoAlarm / IPMA) — yellow, or red for the higher ranks.
- Missing input data — a would-be green is capped to yellow rather than overstated.
- Strong disagreement between forecast models — a green day is pulled back to yellow.
- Night hours — where night spearfishing is banned by law the window is forced red; where it is legal (Australia outside NSW, New Zealand, South Africa) it is capped at yellow, never green.
It all folds into a single 0–10 score and one verdict: go or stay.
A forecast, not a guarantee — the sea has the last word.
Where to get in, where to hunt
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