HAMPTON BEACH, N.H. — Standing on the beach in a blue-and-black wetsuit Sunday afternoon, a thick twist of blond hair draped over one shoulder, Katrina Fiege was almost too chipper.
Fiege, 22, of Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, had slept a scant three hours Saturday night before piling into a car with a friend for a five-hour ocean-bound trek.
“I called my boss and said, ‘I’m going surfing,” the wake-boarding instructor said, wringing the seawater from her hair. “This will probably happen only 20 times in my life I’ll get to surf on a day like this.”
After a dull summer of piddling 2-foot waves, hurricane season is back, and wave conditions up and down the East Coast are expected to only intensify this week, reaching their peak Tuesday, with the National Weather Service predicting 4- to 7-foot waves.
Tropical Storm Leslie, a lethargic but powerful system churning miles away in the Atlantic, has stirred up waves and drawn hundreds like Fiege to chilly New England waters, where board-carrying surf junkies are getting the season’s first taste of some of the best surfing in the Northeast.
While most sports are spoiled by extreme weather patterns, surfers on the East Coast depend on them, study them, and over time, grow to anticipate their turns.
“We’re amateur meteorologists,” said Rick Evans, 59, who has been riding waves in New Hampshire for about 30 years. When he first started surfing in 1967, the best way to learn about a beach was to surf it.
Now, though, technology has drastically eased the quest.
Online, Evans studies wind and water charts, wave models, and radar readouts; he pores over sand tables, water temperatures, and tidal tics.
He monitors live footage of surf beaches, checking from Ocean City, Md., to Gooches Beach, Maine, for signs of breakers to come.
Amplifying the brain power is a deep and committed online community.
“These guys are so good they can predict a swell within a six- or eight-hour period, which in the old days was unheard of,” Evans said.
But the access to inside information cuts both ways for some locals like him, who continue a tradition of territoriality.
“The bad news with that is that we used to have a day, a day and a half before people would hear from their friends or family’’ about the surf.
On Sunday at a popular spot known as The Wall, a nearly mile-long stretch of prime surfing territory named for the concave concrete sea wall that borders it, license plates betrayed the origin of the invaders: Quebec, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine.
It was a smattering of Boston resident-only parking stickers that gave away Eric Wang, a 30-year-old biologist who works at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in the Back Bay.
Wang peered over the seawall Sunday morning and smiled, a sign he knew his trip north was not in vain.
“Here everyone is so starved for waves, you have to go out and get ’em when they’re here,” Wang said before scampering toward the surf, which at times was 6 feet high.
Four surf shops that stay open year-round keep the local community stocked with gear. Mike Paugh, 47, owner of surf shop Zapstix in nearby Seabrook, N.H., said that since he opened the shop in 1991, he has watched the popularity of the sport explode locally.
“People used to come into my shop and say there’s no surfing around here,” said Paugh, who was ferrying a handful of Canadian surfers in a tricked out, flat-black passenger van Sunday morning.
Seabrook, with its resident-only parking rules, makes it difficult for surfers to flock there on the same scale as at Hampton Beach, where the bobbing, black-suited paddlers dotted the water like ants on a log.
Paugh, who was the only surf shop owner of the four in the area to continue to rent boards during the storm swell, said the summer has been largely devoid of waves, making his anticipation of Leslie bittersweet.
“We’ve been tracking this storm since it came off of Africa, when it was just a cloud,” he said.
“We hope it develops into something, but at the same time hope that it doesn’t turn into a Katrina and wipe out a city.”
Matt Byrne can be reached at mbyrne.globe@gmail.com.