Wednesday, April 06, 2016

4 6 16 morning call

Yesterday morning Hookipa offered epic swimming conditions, and that's what I went for.
Lahaina side was knee to waist glassy all morning, but I had stuff to do and couldn't go.

No action shots either, but I got this little sequence from March 29 that shows one of the etiquette rules that gets violated the most.
I just turned my board to paddle for a wave and I have a couple of surfers in front of me. The wave is a left and the surfer indicated by an arrow is paddling wide towards the shoulder. Had she kept doing that, she would have been right on my line and highly interfered with my ride.


Instead, as soon as she saw me paddling, she changed her direction and started paddling deep towards the peak. She's gonna wear the wave on the head in order to let me have a clean line. That's how the rule is and thank you so much blog reader Natasha for sticking to it.


That's how the wave looked after I caught it and it was a really good ride, it would have been a shame to have it ruined.
BTW, this is a surfing etiquette rule. The equivalent rule in windsurfing is the exact opposite. Why? Try duck dive a windsurf board! So the guy sailing out has right of way and the windsurfer on the wave (who has much more mobility than a surfer) has to adapt to his decision and sail around him.


At 4am Waimea reads:
7.3ft @ 7s from 347° (NNW)
2.4ft @ 12s from 311° (NW)

That is exactly what was expected and below is the graph that shows the extremely fast rise of the short period windswell. That's pretty much when the front hit. The longer period component coming from the back of the fetch instead, is taking its time to rise, but it's good to see it there.
Because of the active wind on it, the waves are going to be pretty horrible for surfing on the north shore. A couple of spots might look better than others, but overall it'll be a crappy day (or two).
West side might offer some cleaner conditions, specially if the 12s component increases throughout the day. The main problem over there too will be the wind. Today is going to be strong no matter where you are, and that's no good.

Lanai reads 1.3ft @ 14s from 245° (WSW), I would definitely check the webcam before going, since the strong northerly wind usually gets all the way down to Lahaina.


Wind map shows a nice NW fetch associated with a low that is going to move east (together with everything else). It also shows a couple of northerly fetches, the closer of which is responsible for today's victory at sea conditions on the north shore.


South Pacific shows a couple of cyclones that have tiny fetches oriented towards us, but one of them will evolve into that deep low forecasted for the weekend of which I posted a modeled map a couple of days ago. Stay tuned.


In the absence of MC2km (it seems that Woody, the county worker that every morning pushes a big red button to update the maps, has called in sick), here's the noon windity closeup that shows the direction of the trades. Too onshore on the north shore to offer any remarkable wave sailing (for the maui standards, of course). The Kanaha windsurfers will be happy to do some jumps. West side looks more sideshore, but with waves of that period, the wave riding is gonna rank pretty low anyway. At least in my spoiled scale.


And this is the 6.30am radar that shows lots of rain. Bit of a crappy day really, but we need those to appreciate the nice ones.

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