Yup
Weather quite often wreaked havoc on U-boat operations, so your frustration is understandable but not at all unrealistic.
In theory, the GHG hydrophones are usable on the surface, but in practice you would basically have to be at a dead stop in completely calm water to get anything out of them - and even then, their performance would be far worse than a few meters under the surface. Cavitation, noise from the diesels, and the scattering effect of the surface itself would basically make them useless. On the balance of things, making the hydrophones usable on the surface in SH3 would basically be unrealistic.
Similarly, I have not seen any historical evidence of U-boats ever conducting attacks either by acoustic data alone, or even primarily by hydrophone or sonar. Even the Type XXI relied on periscope observations for shooting, and as for the older boats, neither the GHG nor KDB hydrophones were ever designed for targeting. So, don't expect a lot of success from blind shooting with hydrophone or sonar - there was none historically in WWII.