Yoshi's wave looks pretty smooth, but most of them looked like this instead.
In this phase of my life, I'd rather surf small and clean than sail big and blown out.
5am significant buoy readings
South shore
SW
1.4ft @ 13s from 136° (SE)
That's the only southerly energy reading I found and it would seem like an indication that today that energy is really small. BUT, look at the set I just "caught" on the webcam... that's chest high. The size will be greatly reduced around the 8.50am minus low tide. Do check the webcams yourself, please, consistency might be an issue.
North shore
Pauwela
5.7ft @ 8s from 26° (NNE)
Pauwela's reading are totally in line with the history of the fetch of the northerly swell. 26 degrees is a great direction for The Point at Hookipa, which I heard wasn't as bad as I judged it from the road yesterday. Should stay similar throughout the day.
Couple of words about tomorrow's "big" south swell.
First, Pat Cladwell's analysis of its arrival time (you can read his whole wonderful discussion on link n.9): The pacioos/cdip american samoa buoy provides an ideal gauge for swell within 190-200 degrees since it is smack dab between the wave source and Hawaii. The buoy showed a peak in the 14-18 second bands within 4-10 am HST Tuesday 5/23. With a distance of about 2200 nm, and the travel speed of the 17 second energy at 600 nm per day, that is roughly a 3.5 day travel for the peak energy, which has the event fully filled in by 4 pm HST Friday. This represents the peak of the spectrum, but lower, longer period energy will begin locally about a day ahead, Thursday afternoon, with inconsistent sets trending up. The spin-up time through Friday morning should see occasional sets above average.
I only feel like adding that for southerly swells the arrival time between Oahu and Maui is pretty much the same.
Below is the Surfline forecast that shows the way the swell should climb up. Bigger arrows mean longer periods. (in the meantime, the Lahaina webcam keeps showing sets... this week has been really good).
2pm wind map shows ligther than yesterday trades, but still trades. Note to self: possible windfoiling opportunity.
I'm loving the Meteogram automatically generated maps, I pretty much don't need to circle the fetches anymore. But I still like the Windy graphical representation of the winds, so I'm going to separate north and south Pacific and put the two maps next to each other. Map on the left is around midnight, map on the right is 8pm last night, so only four hours difference.
The map on the right marks with different colors only the winds that are directly oriented towards Hawaii (which is what a fetch is). I believe that, depending on the size of the fetch and thanks to the angular spreading, we'll receive energy from the winds around that colored area too.
North Pacific shows very little wave generation for us today.
South Pacific instead has a monster fetch way down south and that will give the "big" weekend swell a nice rebound mid next week. Map on the right shows that only the bottom part of that strong winds area is directly oriented towards us. Probaly 8 days of travel time from down there, so the rebound should happen around Thursday/Friday next week.
Morning sky.
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