surfline

What This Skill Does

The Surfline skill for OpenClaw provides a powerful, privacy-focused way to integrate real-time surf forecasting and ocean condition reporting into your agent. By leveraging Surfline's public endpoints, the skill allows you to retrieve wave height, wind, swell direction, and tide information without needing a personal login or session cookies. It is designed to be lightweight, utilizing local caching to ensure performance while remaining respectful of the underlying API's rate limits. The skill provides two primary methods of interaction: searching for specific spot IDs and generating formatted surf reports for those locations.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, ensure you have the OpenClaw framework installed. Open your terminal and run the following command to download and configure the skill:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/miguelcarranza/surfline

Once installed, you can search for locations using scripts/surfline_search.py and display reports via scripts/surfline_report.py. For frequent users, populate the ~/.config/surfline/favorites.json file as per the provided example to enable the multi-spot summary feature via scripts/surfline_favorites.py.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for surf enthusiasts who want a consolidated view of their favorite breaks. It can be used by developers to build automated morning briefings, such as alerting you via Slack or email if your local surf spot reaches a specific wave height threshold. It is also useful for trip planning, allowing agents to analyze weather windows by comparing reports across multiple geographic regions simultaneously.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the current conditions for Cardiff Reef and tell me if it's worth heading out this morning."
2. "Summarize the surf report for all my favorite spots listed in my configuration file."
3. "Look up the spot ID for 'D Street' and give me the latest wave height and wind forecast for that location."

Tips & Limitations

To ensure reliable performance, avoid excessive polling of the public endpoints. The skill includes basic caching, which should be sufficient for standard reporting intervals. Note that spot IDs are stable, so you should keep a personal record of them to avoid re-searching. Because this tool relies on public data, if Surfline alters their backend schema, you may need to manually update the scripts/surfline_client.py file to maintain compatibility. The skill does not provide premium features like live stream access; it is strictly intended for text-based forecasting and meteorological metrics.