...then some rights...
...and when the wind increased I went for a quick sail. A better sailor than me would have hit that section and got a massive aerial, but notice how my board is completely out of the water because of the chop. Too risky to do stuff like that with my skill and at my age.
I actually went out mostly because I wanted to have a look at the Haleakala while planing from all the way out with the whole ocean doing the "aluminum foil" effect in front of me. It was absolutely gorgeous. I don't like strong Kona's, but they do bring a special light to the north shore. Haiku residents must love it too, since the place becomes like a reverse Kihei and they can finally dry up a bit.
Later on by Jimmie Hepp took some photo and I grabbed a couple from this gallery.
You can see a serious chop also in the wake of Levi Siver's board.
4am significant buoy readings
South shore still blown out by the Kona
North shore
NW101
11.6ft @ 16s from 297° (WNW)
Hanalei
7.5ft @ 17s from 322° (NW)
Waimea
5.3ft @ 13s from 330° (NW)
3.4ft @ 9s from 321° (NW)
3.3ft @ 18s from 318° (NW)
Pauwela
4.5ft @ 13s from 329° (NW)
3.7ft @ 9s from 334° (NNW)
1.7ft @ 20s from 327° (NW)
Unfortunately for the readers that would like to just know how big the waves are going to be today, the buoys today offer plenty opportunity for analysis that I am not going to miss. The collage below shows the graph of the four reported buoys starting from the NW101 in the top left corner and the other ones following a Z pattern.
I put an arrow on NW101 and Hanalei graphs to indicate when the swell hit the 5f mark. As you can see, there's a delay of 8 hours (4pm vs midnight). I never calculated what the travelling time is for the wonderful Garden Isle (and I won't), but that makes sense. At 18s, for Maui it would be more like 14h (remember, you start at 16h at 16s, and then you add one and subtract one from those two numbers and viceversa for the other periods), which would mean 6am, but that is not going to happen. We won't see 5f 18s at 6am, because the original direction of the swell is west enough to get blocked by the upstream islands.
A second thing to notice is the shorter period (13s) component associated with this new swell that instead has picked up nicely at Waimea and Pauwela. It was generated by a part of the same fetch that had lighter winds than the longer period one. If you want to know in better detail, please read Pat Caldwell's meteo poem at link n.9 of GP's list of meteo websites in the right colum of this blog.
This 13s component seem to have squeezed in the local waters much better than the 18s, so the morning surf should be effected more by those 4.5ft @ 13s then by those 1.7ft @ 20s. But the long period is definitely going to be building all day, so it's going to be an interesting swell to observe.
This 13s component seem to have squeezed in the local waters much better than the 18s, so the morning surf should be effected more by those 4.5ft @ 13s then by those 1.7ft @ 20s. But the long period is definitely going to be building all day, so it's going to be an interesting swell to observe.
As usual, the most important thing for the quality of the waves will be once again the Kona wind, which I will talk about below.
1) one of the longest WNW fetches you can possibly see in the north pacific
2) a sliver of a N fetch out of which we might get a bit of angular spreading. We might not even notice it because we're gonna be dominated by westerly energy for the next 4-5 days.
NAM3km map at 7 shows moderate Kona that is predicted to slightly increase later on.
No comments:
Post a Comment