Koh phangan 18.8

#5666 of 5756 surf spots in the world · 🇹🇭 Thailand · Surat Thani · near Surat Thani

Needs the right swell, wind is the enemy here, boardshorts water.

Best time to surf Koh phangan

It rarely works. The nearest airport is HKT (261 km) and the nearest town is Surat Thani (100 km).

What is under Koh phangan

Eight kilometres out along its swell window the sea floor sits over 54 m.

Measured, not estimated: NOAA ETOPO 2022 global relief at 15 arc-seconds, about 460 m per cell, sampled along this spot’s own swell window. At that scale the survey sees passes and channels; it cannot see a reef ledge, so nothing here is said about how the wave breaks.

Why 18.8

Seven parts, each normalised 0 to 1 and multiplied by its weight; the sum is scaled so the best spot in the world scores 100. Wave quality and what the spot does on its best days carry more than half of it, which is what separates this from a ranking of where the water is warm.

The detail

Faces 150° with 67% open water around it. Friendly morning wind 41% of days. Mean peak period 3.3 s. Days over 3 m: 0%. On its best tenth of days it reaches 0.8 m, with a peak period of 4 s. Mellow days (0.4 to 1.2 m): 54%. Months that work: 1 of 12. Coordinates 9.680, 100.073 (OpenStreetMap).

What it costs to be here

Remote spot, so the local estimate is 15% below the country average. Estimate: World Bank PPP price level for Thailand (2025, United States = 1.00) applied to a fixed surfer basket, then adjusted for how remote the spot is. Your own number moves with the season and how you live.