Motutapu 85.7

#402 of 5756 surf spots in the world · 🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Rarotonga · near Avarua

Works almost every day, wind is the enemy here, no off season.

Best time to surf Motutapu

The best time to surf Motutapu is February, March, April. The season runs Feb to Feb. In February the water sits around 28°C, so pack boardshorts, and the typical wave is 1.9 m. The nearest airport is RAR (9 km) and the nearest town is Avarua (8 km).

What is under Motutapu

Eight kilometres out along its swell window the sea floor drops to 64 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 85.7

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 100° with 64% open water around it. Friendly morning wind 26% of days. Mean peak period 11.8 s. Days over 3 m: 9%. On its best tenth of days it reaches 3.0 m, with a peak period of 14 s. Mellow days (0.4 to 1.2 m): 1%. Months that work: 12 of 12. Coordinates -21.245, -159.723 (OpenStreetMap).

What it costs to be here

Airport and town on the doorstep, so the local estimate is 15% above the country average. Estimate: World Bank PPP price level for Cook Islands (2025, United States = 1.00) (no separate series, so we scale NZ) 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.