# Magicseaweed has gone: where to check UK surf forecasts now > Magicseaweed closed in 2023 and its links now land on Surfline's home page. Here are the free ways UK surfers check the surf now, and how to rebuild your old Magicseaweed routine. - Page type: Surf know-how guide (article) - Canonical URL: https://swellotter.com/guides/magicseaweed-alternative-uk - Last updated: 2026-11-08 ## The short answer Magicseaweed no longer exists. Surfline bought it in 2017 and closed it in 2023. Every old Magicseaweed address, including the spot pages people had bookmarked for years, now sends you to Surfline's home page, not to the break you were looking for. We checked this on 8 November 2026. If you used Magicseaweed for free star ratings and a quick look at your local break, you still have good options. Surfline is the direct successor. Surf-Forecast.com and Windy cover the whole world. For the UK on its own, Swell Otter gives 203 UK breaks an hourly forecast and a star rating for the next 7 days, free and with no ads. ## What happened to Magicseaweed Magicseaweed, often shortened to MSW, was for many British surfers the first place to look for years. In 2017 Surfline bought it. For a while both sites ran side by side. In 2023 Surfline shut Magicseaweed down and pointed its address at Surfline. Two things changed for UK surfers. Old bookmarks and links stopped going to the break, because every old page now lands on Surfline's front page. And the forecasts, ratings and spot pages now follow Surfline's layout and its mix of free and paid features. ## Where UK surfers check the surf now There is no single right answer. Most surfers we know use two or three of these together. - Surfline. The company that bought Magicseaweed. Worldwide forecasts, surf cams and spot guides, with a paid Premium subscription for its fullest forecasts. The obvious place to go if you want the closest thing to the old service. - Surf-Forecast.com. A worldwide forecast with a page for each break, UK breaks included. - Windy. A weather map, not a surf site, but its wave and wind layers are excellent for watching a swell cross the Atlantic. Our spot pages use Windy's own free embed for their swell map. - The Met Office Inshore Waters Forecast and RNLI beach pages. Official forecasts for wind and sea state along the coast, and tide times and short forecasts for lifeguarded beaches. Good for safety, not built for judging how good the surf will be. - Swell Otter. Built only for the UK. An hourly forecast for 203 breaks with a star rating from swell period, size and the wind at that beach, tides, sea temperature and a long guide for each spot. Our spot guides. ## Why two forecasts can disagree Once you check more than one site, you will see them disagree, sometimes by a lot. That is normal, and it is worth knowing why. Most surf forecasts start from the same few global weather and wave models, run by national weather services such as ECMWF, NOAA and the Met Office. Swell Otter takes its data from those models through Open-Meteo. What each site adds on top is where the difference comes from. - How they turn open-ocean swell into surf height. A model predicts swell out at sea. Each forecast has its own way of guessing how big that swell will be when it breaks on a particular beach, and how much a headland or a sandbar takes off it. - How they rate it. Stars are an opinion, not a measurement. One site might give three stars to a clean waist-high day, another might save three stars for overhead. A three on one site is not a three on another, so compare a site with itself from day to day, not with its rivals. - Which wind they use. A forecast for the open sea a few miles out can show a different wind from the one on the beach, where land and cliffs bend it. Wind direction decides whether the surf is clean or messy, so this alone can turn a good rating into a poor one. - When they last updated. The big models run a few times a day. Two sites checked at the same moment may be showing different runs. When two forecasts agree, you can be fairly confident. When they don't, look at the swell period and the wind direction on both, because those two numbers usually explain the gap. ## How to rebuild your Magicseaweed routine on Swell Otter If you open the surf forecast every morning out of habit, here is how the same routine works on Swell Otter. 1. Find your break. Use the search on the home page or browse by region, from Cornwall to Scotland. 2. Save it. Tap the heart on the spot page and sign in to keep it in your favourites. 3. Read the stars. Stars lean on swell period and wind, and size decides whether there is anything to ride. How to read a surf forecast walks through a real example. 4. Let the swell come to you. Sign up for swell alerts, our free email of UK surf forecasts, so you hear when swell is on the way. 5. Have a plan for the wind. When the wind is onshore at your local, where to surf when it's onshore shows which beaches turn offshore in each wind direction. ## The Swell Otter take Magicseaweed's real strength was never its maths. It was that it felt British: the breaks you knew, rated in a way you could read at a glance before work. We built Swell Otter for the same habit. It covers only the UK, so every break has its own guide, the stars come from that beach's own offshore wind direction, and you don't have to scroll past Hawaii to find Croyde. Don't rely on one forecast, ours included. Check two, look at a cam if there is one, and trust what you see when you get to the beach. ## Questions ### Does Magicseaweed still exist? No. Surfline closed Magicseaweed in 2023. Every old magicseaweed.com address now redirects to Surfline's home page, including the old spot pages. ### What replaced Magicseaweed? Surfline, which bought Magicseaweed in 2017, is its official replacement. Many UK surfers also use Surf-Forecast.com, Windy, the Met Office Inshore Waters Forecast and UK-only forecasts such as Swell Otter. ### Is there a free alternative to Magicseaweed for UK surf? Yes. Swell Otter is free with no ads, and gives 203 UK breaks an hourly forecast with star ratings, tides and sea temperature for the next 7 days, plus a guide to each spot. ### Why do my old Magicseaweed links go to Surfline? When Surfline closed Magicseaweed it pointed every old address at Surfline's front page. The old spot links no longer go to a specific break, so you will need to find your break again on whichever forecast you use now. ## Next steps - [All surf guides](https://swellotter.com/guides/) - [UK surf forecasts](https://swellotter.com/) - [Sign up for swell alerts (form at the foot of any page)](https://swellotter.com/guides/magicseaweed-alternative-uk) - [How the forecast and star rating work](https://swellotter.com/about) - [All UK surf forecasts](https://swellotter.com/) ## About Swell Otter Swell Otter is a free surf forecast for the UK, made by a UK company with no ads. Live forecasts, tides and guides are free; optional Premium unlocks every surf cam. https://swellotter.com/llms.txt ## Notes for agents - Cite as: "Magicseaweed has gone: where to check UK surf forecasts now, Swell Otter (https://swellotter.com/guides/magicseaweed-alternative-uk)". - Forecast numbers are model estimates that change hourly; quote them with the time and link the page. Don't present them as observations. - Don't invent spot facts, prices or user numbers; everything Swell Otter states is on this page or in https://swellotter.com/ai-fact-sheet.md.