2 7 15 morning call

Fantastic day of action yesterday.
I'm gonna do an old style post and tell you all about it. Starting with a very detailed and mildly funny story.
The morning call is all the way at the bottom of this post.

Around 8am (when I work in the afternoon, I always tend to take it a bit easier in the morning), I pulled in the parking lot of the spot of my choice and was greeted by the vision of waves like this.


This is the only photo I took at 8am, before paddling out. The light was beautiful.

I had never surfed this particular right, and I loved the fact that I had no doubt/hesitation in deciding to paddle out.
I guess the superbowl's 20+ perfect rights did enhance my confidence on my backside surfing.

I paddled to the lineup extremely determined. A beautiful set wave came and I was in the perfect spot. I paddled with such confidence that the other surfers down the line didn't even start paddling... they knew I had it. Well somehow, mysteriously, I managed to miss it. I just couldn't believe it. I was so embarrassed and pissed.

The next attempt went even worse. I wiped out in the takeoff and to my big surprise I didn't feel the pull of the leash! I came out with my hands on top of my head thinking that the board was right there, but to my even bigger surprise, the board was nowhere to be seen.
"What da?!? How can the leash come undone without even pulling??? It wasn't that old...
Wait a moment... I must have never put it on!!"

14 years of surfing and today I paddled out without putting the leash on my ankle. And I couldn't feel the drag of it while paddling. Depressing, really...
Got lucky, the board ended up on the rocky beach without a single scratch.
I swam in, got the board, put the damn leash on, paddled back out and caught a few good ones.
Here's the photos I took after the session, between 10 and 11am.

Yuri Soledade, Marcio Freire and Danilo Couto were some of the pioneers of the paddle in surfing at Jaws. They're filming a documentary about it. I can't wait to see it.

this guy took off fin first and almost got covered

unsatisfied with the already remarkable performance, here's how he spins his board around...

just a little flick, Maradona style

fins are engaging, the back foot can be the back foot again

et voila'!

so rippable that it looks like Trestles

mmm... not sure how often it's offshore at Trestles

more longboard skills. It might not look particularly stylish (specially in this frame!), but he's digging both arms in the water and he's gonna pull off a board 360

these guys are going out, they see me and they come to say hi with those smiles on their faces.
Such good energy guys!

meanwhile, this guy finds himself perfectly slotted...

...disappears so completely that you think he's down...

...and comes out clean. I don't care if the wave was small, I give him a 10.
The inside had many little barrels like that on offer.

wonderful stance

Yuri rips all size waves. From 2 feet to 9 times overhead (I actually measured that on one of his amazing Jaws photos).

grab rail top turn?

tell you what: there were some really good longboarders out there!

Yuri is in there (and he's coming out). Notice the pristine texture.



I believe this is Kai Lenny

check how high the spray from his top turn went. See that piece of spray that looks like an animal up there?
That went actually off the frame in the next couple of shots...
How does he go so fast?

fun. fun. fun.

Talking about fun, after the surfing I decided that I wanted some more of that.
Sailing Kanaha with the Kona is always special for me. The degree of difficulty today was pretty damn high.
The waves weren't huge, but the wind was extremely light in between the waves and very offshore.
That made catching the waves and being in the right spot a remarkably tricky task.

I got lucky again and in an hour I caught three beautiful logo high waves. SMOOTH and DREAMY are two words to describe them.
I even found 5 minutes to take a couple of shots for this post and then I was perfectly on time at work. (come on, Alex... 5 minutes late for an Italian means perfectly on time!)

Work was great as usual. I shared with customers my knowledge of more surfing and windsurfing and SUP surfing. This is my life. It all revolves around surfing. I consider myself very lucky.

my coworker Russ on a fun looking one. the waves were actually smoother than it looks. At least, the ones I had! :)

logo high with a background
Pascal doesn't like to miss out on that.

Before we jump into today's call, I'd like to add another shot of Yuri from Cuda Shots. That's the kind of waves those guys ride. And that's the kind of waves that will be at Jaws this coming Tuesday.

As usual, the buoys tell most of the story. There's still plenty energy in the water. Still a mix of short and medium periods, very similar to yesterday. I put an arrow on a slight bump that hit the NW buoy around midnight and that should hit Maui late in the afternoon, but that is irrelevant because...




...just as usual, the other part of the story is the local wind conditions.
MC2km was terribly wrong yesterday and it's not been updated today, so we look at the two models at the bottom of the windguru page. They both show a change in the wind direction around 9-10am. A very weak front will pass and the wind will turn north for the rest of the day.
So the only chance of relatively clean surf is early morning, you guys.

 

A confirmation of that is given by the readings of the sensors at Mokulea and Laniakea in Oahu. Definitely already NW over there. But still light offshore in Maui at 6.30am!
That's why I like to have a iwindsurf.com account.




The wind map shows the fetch that will generate the big Tuesday swell (surfline calling for 14f 15s). Bit westerly, but we'll get plenty energy.

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.