Obyan 68.6

#2479 of 5756 surf spots in the world · 🇲🇵 Northern Mariana Islands · Saipan · near Capitol Hill

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

Best time to surf Obyan

The best time to surf Obyan is April, September, October. It rarely works. In April the water sits around 28°C, so pack boardshorts, and the typical wave is 1.6 m. The nearest airport is SPN (2 km) and the nearest town is Capitol Hill (12 km).

What is under Obyan

Eight kilometres out along its swell window the sea floor is still shallow, 21 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 68.6

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 145° with 72% open water around it. Friendly morning wind 10% of days. Mean peak period 8.7 s. Days over 3 m: 1%. On its best tenth of days it reaches 2.2 m, with a peak period of 11 s. Mellow days (0.4 to 1.2 m): 26%. Months that work: 12 of 12. Coordinates 15.105, 145.739 (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 Northern Mariana Islands (2025, United States = 1.00) (no separate series, so we scale US) 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.

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