Monday, February 22, 2016

22 2 16 morning call

The Kona wind characterized yesterday.

My early morning surf session at the point was fun, but nothing comparable to the glassy one at sunset the day before. I did manage to find a glassy spot for the sunset session with breathtaking background colors on the mountains.

During the day, as predicted, the windsurfers (some more than others) could enjoy an extremely rare the port tack session at Hookipa. When the Kona is blowing, usually the waves are bigger and Lanes offers a little more wind (plus at Hookipa there might be too many surfers to sail). Yesterday was different, smaller waves, less than 10 surfers, plenty wind, and so here we go. This is Victor Fernandez hitting an aerial on the closeout where the right coming from Pavillions meets the left of Middles. The surfers at Pavils must have been wondering "what the hell is going on today??".
Photo by Jimmie Hepp.


Buoys's graphs are quite interesting today. I put an arrow where I think the swell peaked at the NW buoy, which is around 8pm yesterday. Period seems to be around 15s, so we'll give that 15h to get to Maui, plus an extra hour in case there was traffic on the highway: GP's estimate for the peak of the swell in Maui would be around noon.
But Waimea is already 20f 17s, which means that traffic wasn't bad and the 17s travel faster (26mph). Hundred miles between Oahu and us, that energy should take 4 hours to get here, so, despite Surfline's prediction of the afternoon, I'm going to finally call the peak in Maui between 10am and noon.

Pauwela's reading at 6am are:
11.9ft @ 14s from 337° (NNW)
3.1ft @ 10s from 332° (NNW)

The reason the buoys recorded shorter periods first, specially at the NW buoy, is that the head of the fetch and the related shorter period freshly generated waves were close to them. Only later on the longer period waves coming from the winds from the back of the fetch caught up.
That difference of time was less at Hanalei, even less at Waimea and even less at Pauwela, because in the meantime the longer period waves could catch up more with the shorter period ones.

Anyway, waves are going to be big and rough today, pick a spot that is not directly exposed to NW, unless you're Laird.


Wind map shows the two lows most definitely feeling each other's presence. It's like two stars feeling each others' gravitational fields. The one on the left has a big fetch that will be responsible for the big Thursday swell. The one on the right is the one that made today's big swell and is still making some waves that will arrive from a northerly direction in a few days.


Today's wind should be like this: light but onshore.


A quick look at the south. Still a couple of fetches that will make worth checking the Lahaina webcam in a week. The readings at Barbers will be useless the whole week, because of the wrap of the big swells will mask whatever little energy we might get from the S or SW. BTW, that storm over Fiji did some serious damage and some victims.


The stat below shows that the blog is already back to a thousand readers a day. Thanks everybody for tuning in. The last 30 days it had around 26k visitors, as soon as that number goes into 30k, the price for advertising will go up, so now would be a good time to do it.



One last thing. I need to reduce the number of boards in my quiver. These two are really hard to let go, since they are both great boards.
http://honolulu.craigslist.org/mau/spo/5458668969.html
http://honolulu.craigslist.org/mau/spo/5458634701.html

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