11 5 15 morning call

I had a pretty full day yesterday that saw a sunrise surf session in Lahaina, a surf lesson, couple of heats in the windsurfing contest, judging and rider spotting.
I went to sleep at 7.34pm and that's a new personal record.
Feels good to go back to the natural biological rhythm that was entirely screwed for the whole human species by the invention of the electric bulb.

Here's my student Cameron who did awesome.

Here's Morgan Henderson in the AWT Amateur category (photo Jimmie Hepp) windsurfing contest.
Level went down 2-3 notches compared to the pro's, but still fun to watch. Most definitely fun to sail with only 3 other guys out and nobody in the way.




More of the amateurs today, head judge Duncan will probably throw Masters and Grand Masters in too to try to complete all the single eliminations.
Wind should be good, let's see what's up with the waves.
Buoys 4am
NW
6.7ft @ 9s from 82° (E)           

2.2ft @ 14s from 121° (ESE)

1.7ft @ 6s from 97° (E)

Pauwela

7.5ft @ 10s from 52° (ENE)           

4.1ft @ 6s from 64° (ENE)

 

Barbers

3.3ft @ 7s from 135° (SE)           

2.6ft @ 16s from 188° (S)

 

All the NW energy (which yesterday blessed us with fairly frequent shoulder to head high sets) has completely gone, but the windswell went up. Not ideal, but much better than flat.
The wind map below doesn't show anything good either (told you, gonna be like this for quite a while!).
The NW fetch that generated the Saturday/Sunday swell (Surfline calls for 5f 16s at 2pm Saturday) went completely zonal so it is now not generating anything anymore for us.

I chose the world wide map, because it shows beautifully the circulation of the atmosphere. This is a common scenario. The trades blow east to west between 15 and 35 degrees (north and south) and the more intense, ground swell producing stormy winds blow west to east between 40 and 60 degrees (north and south).
In this particular case, all the flows are quite zonal (kinda horizontal in the picture). I like a lot better when the zones I described above mingle some and then you have fetches that are more "diagonal" and send waves our way.

 

Let's not forget those 2.6ft @ 16s from 188° (S). Yesterday there were occasional shoulder high sets. I didn't mention those in the short text report, because the report is based on the average size of what I see. So if you read knee to waist, which was the average, you can imagine there's some sets bigger than that.
Sometimes I specify that, but sometimes I'm just too much in hurry to get out there and I'm not the fastest smart phone typer around.
Should be fun today too, but check the lahaina webcam before going.
Here's the fetch that generated today's south swell 7 days ago.

Someone asked me where Hawaii is in that map. 
Below I over imposed the south pacific weather map on the big blue world so you can see where Hawaii sit compared to New Zealand.
Next time, just follow the 160W meridian, measure the distance between 40 and 20 degrees latitude and add a couple of those distances to the north of the 20 degrees parallel and you'll know where we are: well outside of that map.
Amazing how efficiently waves travel. The secret lays in the fact that the water molecules don't physically move from down there to up here. They just nudge each others' shoulders all the way...