Monday, December 25, 2017

Monday 12 25 17 morning call

Shortboard surfing, SUP foiling and windfoiling was the fat three sessions bounty of yet another gorgeous sunny day of waves in paradise. For me, it's Christmas every day.

In between sessions I took some photos at the harbor where a fine spectacle of surfing was displayed by some very qualified names. We'll start with Ridge Lenny. I like how the spray of his turn mixed with the white water of the wave in the back and looks like snow.

Here's a section dedicated to his much more famous brother Kai. Unfortunately I blew the framing in this one, but it's good enough to appreciate a very Tom Currenish bottom turn.

Which resulted in an explosive top turn.

A lovely barrel.


And a backside snap for good measure. 99% of the time, when you ask Kai how was it, he's gonna answer:"super fun!". Well, he wasn't lying this time and I think he actually never lies about that. He's so good that he can always have fun in all conditions.

And while I was sitting on my chair doing my hand held photo shoot, the sun got suddenly obscured by the massive figure of Sunny Garcia walking in front of me. The guy is built rock solid.


He put up a barrel show on a lovely Stewart longboard. We carry a bunch of those at Hi-Tech.

 
I don't know how many times he has surfed that wave, but he sure didn't seem to have any problem tuning into it.


It's not Backdoor, but he did backdoor the hell out of this one and travelled all the way to the end to find an improbably exit...

 

...which wasn't graceful though.

 
4am significant buoy readings
South shore
No indication of southerly energy at the buoys, the Surfline forecast calls for 0.7f 10s.

North shore
NW101
6.7ft @ 12s from 334° (NNW)

Waimea
2.8ft @ 14s from 342° (NNW)
2.6ft @ 11s from 341° (NNW)

Pauwela
4.2ft @ 12s from 337° (NNW)
3.9ft @ 9s from 56° (ENE)

Yesterday's swell was a beauty, but as predicted it declined pretty quickly during the day. No big deal, because a reinforcement is right on its heels. The collage below shows the graphs of NW101, Pauwela and the Surfline forecast. The red arrow indicates that the reinforcement pulse at the NW buoy started mid day yesterday.
By applying GP's rule for the travelling time (16h @ 16s +/- 1h per 1s), at 12s the waves should take 20 hours to get here, so we can expect the increase to start around 8am this morning. But Waimea hasn't registered it yet, so it might happen a bit later than that. The forecast calls for much bigger numbers, but it won't be the 7 feet it indicates, more like 5-6 IMO. Stay tuned for a beach report from Hookipa before 7am.


Wind map at noon shows easterly trades and possible sailing conditions on the north shore.

North Pacifc shows so many fetches that I had to number them:
1) a strong but distant WNW one
2-3) closer but weaker and smaller NNW and WNW ones
4) a lovely northerly one out of a low that is unfortunately moving NE away from us.
Plenty waves coming.


Nothing of relevance in the South Pacific as you would expect in the middle of their summer.


The closeup satellite page is not working, this other one is a little less zoomed in, but still good to appreciate the morning sky and a weak front approaching Kauai. The front will be responsible for some ideal southerly wind conditions tomorrow. A returning surf guide customer is here for two weeks and asked me to pick two days to take him out for a couple of sessions, for sure we'll be surfing somewhere tomorrow. It's all about the wind, really.

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