Sunday, December 28, 2014

12 28 14 morning call

4am main swell buoy readings:

Maui north shore (indicative of what's in the water on Maui's north shore)
    6.1ft @ 9s from 352° (N)
5.8ft @ 13s from 322° (NW)
           

West lanai Maui north shore (indicative of what's in the water on Maui's south shore)
    2ft @ 13s from 289° (WNW)           
           
 
The reason why I always start this morning call with the buoy readings is because I'd like you guys to read them before we get into the discussion.
They are the key to understanding what comes after.
Or, in other words, they are much more important than the discussion itself. They tell you 60% of the story. The remaining 40% being the local wind conditions.
This time I made an effort to weed out the small less significant swells (there were four at both buoys) in the hope to get your attention to it. Thank you.

Swell-wise, today we have a very similar situation to yesterday. The difference is that yesterday the onshore wind picked up only later in the morning (and the few that listened to my advice to go get them until it lasted, scored fun sessions), this morning is already on it. And it's been on it for more than 24h, so expect the water to be particularly messy.
 
The other side effect of the north wind is the drop in the temperature (58f/14c the low in Paia yesterday).
In the water it's still relatively warm, but with the wind chill factor, on land it can get relatively chilly too. Yesterday I froze my ass off running from the shower to my car after a sunset session and I thought:"how the hell do they surf in winter time on the east coast?!?". Respect to the cold water surfers of the whole world.
 

Below is a satellite picture that shows the classic little dots clouds that indicate more cold air arriving.



That is reflected also by the wind map below, in which I circled the usual fetch in the NW pacific that is kindly making sure that we will have continuous waves from the NW for the whole next week.
I also put an arrow to indicate the wind direction right now in Maui. I call that straight onshore and for me there is not a chance for trade winds to blow for the desperate windsurfers (some of them were sailing along the beach at Kanaha yesterday).


But in reality, without the MC@2Km website, no one really knows what the wind is going to do.
Take the two models at the bottom of the windguru page, for example. One of them even predicts a wind direction of 72 at 4pm, going into 76 at 5pm. Those are getting very close to the regular trade wind direction (which I consider to be 75 to 85), but after having analyzed the evolution of the pressure at sea level (link n.0 on the right), I give that forecast a very, very low confidence factor.

Should I add a summary at the end? Let's see if you guys like it. Today it will be:
very poor surfing conditions and no trade winds windsurfing. Ok, maybe I should have chosen a better day to start that...

Nonetheless, if you're in Maui you're in one of the most beautiful places in the world, so make sure to have fun in the sun everyone!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you for posting this. Im starting to actually understand this stuff.

cammar said...

fuck yeah! That's why I do it. Thanks for the comment!