As usual, thanks Jimmie Hepp.
Today's call is gonna be long and interesting.
First, let's have a look at what's at the buoys (click on it for the numbers).
They all SEEM to be feeling the big swell already. Even Maui reads 1.5ft @ 18s from 322° (NW).
What caught my attention though, was the NW buoy reading: 5.3ft @ 15s from 279° (W), for two reasons:
1) the direction
2) the fact that the period is already down to 15s
These are instead, the peaks of the swell forecasted by Surfline for the main Hawaiian Islands:
13f 18s from 309 in Maui at 8pm Wednesday
17f 18s from 307 in Oahu at 2pm
21f 18s from 303 in Kauai in the morning
Either the 15s swell hitting the NW buoy right now is another swell or something's clearly wrong.
I confess at the beginning I didn't really know what to think, since this swell wasn't really in the Maui forecast.
But it is in the Kauai forecast (which I checked only later), so here's the solution to the mystery: this is not the big swell yet!
But also I discovered something else I'd like to share.
The forecast numbers are decreased in size because of the shadowing effect from Kauai. This is reflected in the map that I took from Surfline again and that effectively shows that shadowing.
This is the positions of the buoys.
And this is a map of the Northwest Hawaiian islands, something most people that live here don't even know about it. They're uninhabited but they're there. And, seen the direction, sure they're gonna do some shadowing on Kauai too. How come most models don't even show these islands?
That puts a big doubt of inaccuracy on all these forecast we can easily access online. And it actually make me feel even more important to be able to analyze them and get to your own conclusion.
A real quick look at the wind map, just to confirm the presence of a long fetch WNW of us (I think there's been a fetch somewhere NW of us for more than 30 days in a row...) and that the light ESE flow that allowed a bit of windsurfing action yesterday is still there (moving away though).
The two models at the bottom of the Windguru page seem to be more optimistic than me about that.
We'll have to wait and see. For now, I'm heading to Hookipa for my morning surf. Photo coming up soon.
Oh btw, the Eddie is not gonna run for this swell. Instead the Jaws contest is called for 8am on Thursday. I heard they won't let anybody get down there, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
Here's the link to the contest website. I bet a wildcard will win it!
Have fun in the sun everyone!
PS. All the sources for this post are permanently linked in the links section on the right of this blog.
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