Once again the show at Hookipa was stolen by the windsurfers who completed the Pro Men single elimination tournament. Winner is Morgan Noireaux and runner up Kauli Seadi, both Hot Sails Maui team team riders.
I sail Hot too and my relationship with the owner/founder Jeff Henderson goes back many many years so I'm really happy for him.
I hope they will both hang in that position when the attacks from the loser brackets will come.
Here's Morgan, photo by Fish Bowl Diaries.
I was skeptical about the wind conditions, but it was a beautiful sunny day and the Haleakala did pull off the magic. Below is the map at 1pm of YESTERDAY OCTBER 29, that shows how well the model that MC@2km uses predicted the sailable conditions.
Why don't I post the one for TODAY instead? Because the maps are not updated yet when I do my morning call and the maps older than 24h are kind of useless.
Highly reliable, but they got to be fresh. So you guys check them out yourselves. Link n.17 on the right.
I can't be bothered with predicting the wind, but I do love trying to predict the waves.
Below the graphs of the NW, Waimea and Pauwela (often I refer to them as "the three buoys").
You HAVE to click on the photo if you want to follow what I'm going to say below. Sorry for the phone users, I know that gets tricky.
Notice how the swell had a first peak around 8am at the first one and, as one would expect from a swell with that angle and period, after 12h it had a similar peak at the Waimea buoy.
Notice also the second peak (couple of feet bigger) the swell had at NW buoy.
And finally notice how different the graph of the Pauwela buoy looks instead and how much smaller the numbers are.
The reason is the original direction of the swell (indicated at the very bottom of the picture); pretty steady around 306-309.
If you draw a line from Hookipa to the tip of Molokai, you get a direction that is roughly 320. That means that a swell from more west than that gets block/refracted by it. But "upswell" of Molokai there's Oahu, Kauai and all the always forgotten islands of the Northern Hawaiian Islands chain.
That means that all these islands will block/refract the swell as well.
From this particular direction, it seems that Waimea is getting pretty much the same amount of energy of the original swell, so Maui's blockage is due mostly to Oahu and Molokai.
Once a swell gets refracted on these islands, it hits the Pauwela buoy from a different direction that the original. In fact, Pauwela's last reading is 7.1ft @ 17s from 317° (NW). You're never gonna observe a reading considerably more west than that at that buoy. No ground swell can come from 300 for example. Unless the whole Kahakuloa collapse in the ocean and creates it.
So, smaller waves that Oahu (gonna be watching the Pipeline cam at the shop later), but 7f 17s are still big waves! Well above my Hookipa threshold, so I'll leave in the dark looking for alternatives again (yesterday's one offered some really nice drops).
My conclusion is that swell in Maui is going to be smaller, more organized (the refraction cuts down most of the shorter period eventual components) and less consistent than the swell of two days ago. In other words, just much much better.
The more east you move on the coast the bigger, so I think the conditions at Jaws will be pretty nice with the light early morning ESE winds.
Wind maps shows a now weak NNW fetch, but don't forget that it has been pretty strong for the past few days, so this swell is also going to be quite long lasting.
I also circled a fetch in the little corner down south that is going to get better.
Talking about south swells, here the reading of Barbers:
4.6ft @ 17s from 284° (WNW)
1.2ft @ 14s from 306° (WNW)
Those are clearly the wrap around Oahu's south shore of the NW swell. We will not get that, IMO it's not west enough to do the same thing in Maui.
But there will be the background energy from the south that the Barbers buoy doesn't even report anymore, since the energy coming from the west is so much bigger.
Check the lahaina webcam before going is my recommendation.
But there will be the background energy from the south that the Barbers buoy doesn't even report anymore, since the energy coming from the west is so much bigger.
Check the lahaina webcam before going is my recommendation.
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