Tuesday 3 28 17 morning call

Yesterday I had two surf sessions, the second of which was absolutely delightful. By myself (which is always a huge plus), knee to waist high with occasional belly high bombs, very clean. It might sound weird to some, but I absolutely love those conditions, specially at that spot and specially with my fantastic small wave board for which I also finally found a set of FCS fins that I dig. Small waves, big fins is what I figure out yesterday.

I missed two potentially good sessions at the same spot in the previous days because I got influenced by someone else's ideas, reports and opinions. That taught me something very important: at least in Maui, I always need to follow my intuition and knowledge.

Action packed afternoon at Hookipa as usual, it's getting hard to pick the best photos by Jimmie Hepp, since there's a lot of great ones. Calling a 9 this week a week in advance, was a pretty easy task, honestly. This is the gallery of the day.






This came up as a memory from 5 years ago on Facebook. Front foot strap was great when up and riding, but very uncomfortable while laying down on it. Also made my paddling very unstable. I even caught same waves paddling with a paddle on my side that I would grab as soon as I would stand up. Levi Siver (the guy doing the aerial over the barreling wave above) was cruising with a SUP at Thousand Peaks, saw me and said:"brah, that thing looks sick! What is it?". Yes, put me on a regular (as opposed to SUP) 6.2, with a footstrap and a paddle in my hands and I can manage to impress Levi. Too bad that the whole thing was too uncomfortable and complicated, so I let go of the experiment.


4am significant buoy readings
South shore
Lanai
3.6ft @ 14s from 260° (W)

2.1ft @ 11s from 260° (W)

1.7ft @ 9s from 196° (SSW)

Lanai still feeling plenty energy from the wrap. How did those waves get to Lahaina is a bit of a mystery. Below there's two pictures that show you how difficult is for them to get there, but straight lines are not a correct representation of reality. Waves refract around not only emerged lands, but also submerged ones too, as long as they are shallow enough (the longer the period, the deeper the waves will feel the bottom), so those angles I calculate are just an indication.

 

Take this one for example. It seems that there is pretty much only one direction that will possible make it south of Ni'iahu, Oahu and Molokai and north of Lanai: 286, but in reality it's probably a range around that. Once they make it to the channel between Molokai and Lanai, that range is 283 to 290.

Which makes me think that instead, in this particular case, they might have taken the route south of Lanai and refracted around its southern tip. Pretty easy to hit Ukumehame at that point (260 degrees), it requires a much sharper turn to hit Lahaina instead (230).
This is to say that I have no idea of how they got there, but they got there. There also was a 2-3f 9s south swell (of which I couldn't find any fetches in the past days wind maps) to make the guessing even more challenging. But in the end, why guessing if there's webcams that show waves? And that's what I recommend to do also today.

 

All of the above considerations have been added to the post Buoys to Maui travel times and Maui's shadow lines, which contains this kind of stuff of most Maui spots and swell directions. If I was a school teacher, I'd ask my students to learn everything written in it by heart.
 

North shore
NW101

7.3ft @ 14s from 315° (NW)

 

Waimea

5.7ft @ 14s from 321° (NW)

 

Pauwela

4ft @ 10s from 65° (ENE)

3.5ft @ 14s from 317° (NW)

 

As soon as I wrote that the windswell is too east to bother Hookipa, here it is a reading from 65 that will definitely bother Hookipa... commentator curse.

Below are the graphs of the three reported buoys. Today should see a slight decrease, but tomorrow a slight bump up.

 

That is explained by Pat Caldwell with the following words:A long-lived area of surface low pressure near the dateline within 30-55°N latitude that set up 3/23 had a reinforcement low merge from the SW in on 3/25. A long, wide fetch of gales over the 305-325 degree band overtook existing seas, which maintained wave heights above 20 feet. The head of the fetch was about 1400 nm away 3/26. The system nosed to within 1200 nm 3/27 as the winds decreased and the low center shifted north. The winds were not as extreme as the previous system, so the dominant wave periods are expected to be short-lived in the 16-17 second band, but settle soon to the 13-15 second band and hold steady. The longest wave period are due Tuesday near sundown locally from 305-320 degrees. Surf should peak above average on Wednesday from 305-325 degrees. It should remain above average Thursday as it slowly declines. A new event is due Thursday evening.
A repeat pattern of the japan-to-dateline, extratropical-cyclone express is expected 3/27-29 to bring a similar round of extra- large, or surf high enough for outer reefs, later in the week.

Don't forget that the timing of the arrival is for Oahu. Add 4 to 8 hours for Maui.

MC2km maps stuck at Sunday, the HRW model on windguru below shows the usual strong easterly, but fortunately starting with a bit of ESE in the early morning. As a matter of fact, the Hookipa sensor reads 9 (4-17)mph from 108 at 6am and that's not bad at all. Worth waiting for the light to check it out for me. I'll post a beach report around 6.30.


Satellite photo at 4.30am.

 

Current wind map pretty much only shows the WNW fetch of next swell. Once again, it's gonna be similar to the actual one, but it seems that the low will get closer to us. We'll see in the next few days.