Friday, December 26, 2014

12 26 14 morning post

4am main swell buoy readings:

Maui north shore (indicative of what's in the water on Maui's north shore)
    7.5ft @ 9s from 46° (NE)

West lanai Maui north shore (indicative of what's in the water on Maui's south shore)
    2.3ft @ 9s from 279° (W)
1.6ft @ 6s from 279° (W)
0.6ft @ 3s from 302° (WNW)

I noticed that these days the "regular" wave forecasts are quite off. Both Pat Caldwell and Surfline (the two that I check) are not calling the sizes that the buoys are reading. I believe both greatly base their forecasts on the WW3 wave model and that must need some fine tuning when the swell is closely generated like the 7.5f 9s out of the NE one we have on tap today.

Yesterday was another gorgeous day of surfing in Maui. I had two really good sessions before getting skunked by a sudden change of the wind at sunset time. It went onshore on the north shore and I'm still trying to figure out why, since today is back to light westerly.
Unfortunately the MC@2km website is not being updated since last sunday and that is a big piece of information missing.
As I say often, the wind in Maui is the most important factor (provided that there's waves). Don't wait for the right tide you guys if the wind is good when you're checking a spot!

Wind map below shows the usual very comforting wide fetch of NW winds (even though kinda light) on the top left corner and another smaller but closer fetch of NNW-N winds. These are the directions we should be observing at the buoys in the next few days, but on this page I like to focus on the conditions of today. It's called morning call for a reason...
So local westerly winds again. Let's talk about it over the closeup map down below.



Just like there will never be a swell out of pure west on the Maui buoy, it's pretty much impossible to register a pure westerly wind on the north shore. The reason is that the West Maui Mountain will block it and deviate it. Depending on the angle it hits it, the wind will either hug the Mountain on the south and blow from WSW on the north shore (like yesterday it did all day until 4pm) or hug it on the north and blow on the north shore from a dreadful NW direction.

 


Right now at 7am it's definitely got a southerly component and that is great. But it is supposed to turn NW at one point. And without the MC@2km maps, we can only have a look at the much less reliable NAM and HRW models that you find at the bottom of the windguru page. They both predict the change of the wind between 11am and 1pm, so the message is clear. Get them before the wind switches!
Where to go? Man, NE is such an easy direction... it pretty much gets everywhere! Sorry, no help there!





Have fun in the sun everyone!

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