Bo Petersen Reporting-FOLLY BEACH — They’re eyeing the tropics out here and they don’t like what they see. Surfers, that is. The hurricane season has been so quiet they’re hoping for just a bit of a Southeast swell from a storm moving off the coast early in the week.

Over the next few weeks, the season moves into the Cape Verde period, the late summer-fall span in which storms tend to roll off Africa and spin into monsters in the Atlantic. As the storms close in on the Southeast coast, they push up the huge waves that surfers crave.

But so far, nothing.

“We’re hurting out here, I’ll tell you that,” said Bates Hagood of Ocean Surf Shop in Folly Beach. “It’s the doldrums of summer. We haven’t gotten a lot (of surf), and it’s that time of year.”

Hurricane forecasters will be issuing mid-season updates to their predictions over the next few weeks, but there isn’t much new to tell. The seas out there are the same cyclone-stifling stew of dust, winds and cooler water that they were at the beginning of the season. The forecast remains: a relatively quiet season.

The qualifier so far is that weather patterns continue to be right for storms blowing off the coast to turn into tropical systems, said Mark Malsick, S.C. Climate Office severe weather liaison. That’s ala Hurricane Gaston that came ashore here in 2004, Tropical Storm Ana that passed by in early May and a storm that could form early in the upcoming week, but is expected to blow off into the Atlantic.

“The only chance I see of us getting a named storm over the next two weeks would be offshore of the Southeast coast, or in the Gulf of Mexico. Storms forming in these locations this time of year typically don’t intensify into major hurricanes capable of causing significant impacts,” said Jeff Masters of Weather Underground.

Last spring, forecasters said conditions suggested the number of tropical cyclones that form this summer would be average or slightly below average, with hurricane numbers in a range from a half-dozen to a dozen or so. So far, the season has produced only three tropical storms: Ana, Bill and Claudette.

The big factor continues to be El Nino, a Pacific Ocean temperature trend that creates “shear” winds in the Atlantic tearing apart tropical storms. And the “little child” has gotten some size on him.

“El Nino has really intensified rapidly, and it now looks like it will be one of the top three strongest El Nino events since 1950,” said Phil Klotzbach, Colorado State University atmospheric science researcher who works with hurricane guru Bill Gray. “Shear across the Caribbean has been stronger over the past 30 days than any other year since 1979.”

Meanwhile, African dust storms and other weather continue to keep the ocean air dry enough to stunt hurricane formation. Sea surface temperatures, the burners that fire up hurricanes, remain about average, said Masters and Klotzbach.

That’s all good news, so far, for the Lowcountry coast — except for the surfers.

“We’re just hoping for a little swell,” Hagood said about the potential storm, “knee high, waist high.”

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