Surfline Premium Membership: Definitely Worth It

Oct 5 2009

Surfline Premium Membership: Definitely Worth It

Posted by Tim at 8:11 am on October 5th, 2009 to Surf Media, Websites.

Surfline Logo I’ve always asked myself, “What kind of person would actually pay for Surfline?”. It just boggled my mind that people would pay money just to have a streaming cam with no ads and extra forecasting when most that information can be found elsewhere online. I have used Surfline almost every day for years and the simple surf report for each surf spot has always been good enough for me. Well…it looks like I found out what kind of person is willing to pay for it, because I just subscribed to it for a year. Let me just briefly tell you how it happened before I go on.

HD Cam Surfline On September 25, 2009, a massive swell was hitting the North Shore. I had surfed Waimea Bay for the first time the night before as it was just starting to hit. It was an amazing experience, and all I could think about that next day was surfing it again. I went on Surfline and watched the streaming cam to try and decide if it was good enough to go back out. After watching a 30-second stream the camera would cut to a commercial. When this would happen I would quickly reload the page so I could skip the commercial by starting over. This started getting really annoying, and sometimes when it finally reloaded I could see that a set had just come through, everyone was paddling back out, and I had missed it. This clearly wasn’t helping me make my decision as to whether or not I should get down there to surf, and then an idea hit me. I decided to quickly look at Surfline’s premium membership benefits and decide if it was worth it to try it out. Less than 10 minutes later I was a premium member and was watching Waimea Bay break on their HD cam, commercial free, full-screen mode on my computer.

Surfline Premium Benefits Some of the benefits of becoming a premium Surfline member are access to the HD cams, extended 7-10 day forecasts, Surfline forecasts on your mobile phone, LOLA info for last 365 days, ad-free surf cams, 5-day near shore models, LOLA global swell model, and custom surf alerts. You can also practically make all the money you spent on it back in the form of savings with all the discounts you can get with the membership. You can get 15% off purchases from a bunch of websites such as swell.com, hss.com, ronjons.com, pacsun.com, and more, all kinds of discounts at surf shops on the east coast, west coast, and Hawaii, 10% off Surfline’s store with $4 flat-rate shipping on anything, 10% off video downloads, surf trip discounts with Wavehunters, Waterways, Kandui Resort, and Quiksilver Travel, and lastly a FOAM magazine subscription discount.

Honestly, there is no reason I can think of that you should not sign up for a premium membership with Surfline aside from spending the money. It only costs $69.95 for a full year, so if you think of that amount split over 12 months it isn’t too bad ($5.82 per month). You also have the option of paying $9.95 monthly if you don’t want to commit to the full year. Out of all the benefits mentioned that you could receive from being a premium member, there are two things I really like. I like being able to make custom surf alerts and I like being able to set my homepage to display the cam and LOLA swells models of my choice. For the custom surf alerts, I get to choose up to 20 breaks and give very specific details about preferred swell direction, wind, weather, wave height, etc, and Surfline will alert me anywhere from immediately to 5 days in advance when my preferred conditions are met. That is pretty rad. You can find surf forecasts or surf reports from a variety of sites for free, including the free version of Surfline, but I don’t think there is anything out there that compares to what you get with Surfline’s premium membership. And if you aren’t aware, you can try it out for free for 15 days…so I say go for it.