rainy day, good time for a post

I had a lot of old photos on the card, here's a selection.



This is Kanaha on Nov 22. Beautiful day.







As you can see it can get big at lowers too...









This is Lanes at noon on Friday, 24 hours before the big swell and the Kona hit. Completely flat and calm. Amazing how quickly the ocean can change its mood...







This is my new 10.2 SUP board made by Mark Raaphorst of Ding King. As soon as I brought it home, I borrowed Ulli's router and... here we go.
This is the third mast track I plug into a board that originally didn't have one. I just love my experimental self...





This is Lanes again, yesterday Sunday Dec 2nd. It was windy in the morning for more Kona sailing action (Kanaha was delightful), but around 2 the rain killed the wind. This surfer doesn't seem too sorry about that...




This is the point at Hookipa instead.








Today a huge NNW swell hit.

The waimea buoy reading at 5.11pm was the following:

date---------time---feet---period---dir---water temp (Celsius)
2007-12-03--17:11--22.04--15.4----339.0--25.90
You don't see 22 feet often... not even in winter in Hawaii! At 15 seconds of period those waves can be amplified up to three times on certain reefs (I'm sure Jaws was pretty freaking big). In fact, Hookipa was the biggest I think I ever saw it. Not pretty. Messy, mean, all white water... not even worth a photo, because the waves were breaking so much outside that you almost couldn't see them! It was just a huge wall of white water for hundreds of yards...

Not many places where to surf when the surf is so big. One, for sure, is the harbor.





Here's a few shots that I took while pondering how many chances I had to catch waves with 30+ excellent surfers out...






Here's a sequence of a guy who drops in a bomb, snaps a turn and gets completely shacked...






Thanks to that guy, I figured I standed no chances to catch anything at all and decided to go surf Paia bay, where I caught three horrible waves for what I think was my shittiest surf session ever. Murky water, messy waves, logs and branches floating around and rain.
Still... what was the water temperature at the buoy?
Here's what I said when two different friends from the UK told me today in two different moments:"what a shitty weather, it looks like home!"
"Yeah right, it may look like home, but it feels a bit warmer doesn't it?"
"Oh yes, I guess you're right..."

I have a huge appreciation towards my life and this wonderful place.
Shittiest surf sesh ever? Still better than soooo many other things I could have done today... like being stuck in the traffic in Rome... work all day in front of a computer... breath the poisons of the polluted air of a city... no thanks. I'll take Paia bay a million times...