The Cove on Camera

Before any drive to the coast, thirty seconds of live footage answers what an hour of forecasts can’t. Three cams cover this water, all free, none of them ours.

The three cams

The cove cam sits on the La Jolla Cove Hotel & Suites roof — watch it via livebeaches.com — and looks at the cove itself, the entry steps and the swim line. It answers the only question that matters. The Scripps Pier cam at scripps.ucsd.edu/piercam shows the wider coast and reads swell better than either. The Marine Room beach cam at marineroom.com/beach-cam covers the Shores shallows — a calmer, sand-bottom stretch a mile north, which makes it the leopard-shark cam in season, not a proxy for cove surge.

How to read them

Swimmers crossing the cove in straight lines: go. Whitewater on the entry steps: don’t. Brown water after a storm: give it two days. A crowd standing ankle-deep at the Marine Room staring down: the sharks are in.

Numbers plus pictures

Our conditions board reads live swell and water temperature from a marine model; the cams show you what those numbers look like on the actual water. Use both, in that order, and you’ll never waste the drive.