11 29 15 morning call

As forecasted, the swell built all day yesterday. Conditions were poor on the north shore because of the wind, the windswell and the mix of other energy in the water (old swell).
This guy didn't seem to mind around 3pm at Hookipa.

The first day of the Sunset Beach contest was very entertaining. If you missed it, a good way to catch up is to watch the action packed heat videos that you find in the video page of each WSL contest website.
Sunset beach: a surf break I have no desire (and skills) to surf.

Below is the graph of the three buoys at 5am. The red lines indicate where the swell kind of topped and got steady in size. You can observe how the travel times to Oahu and Maui are what you would expect based on the tables we've been talking about lately. It's not rocket science and knowing when a swell is going to hit or what it's going to do size wise is an important information, but definitely not the most important one.

Much more important are the local conditions. The north shore has been ugly for the last three days because of the wind direction (more onshore than usual) and the mix of energies in the water.

For example, this morning Pauwela reads:

6.9ft @ 8s from 41° (NE)

6.4ft @ 16s from 323° (NW)

Both swells will hit Hookipa pretty straight on and you can imagine that the result will be a confused breaking pattern. On top of that there will be chop on the face created by the local wind.
The effect of that windswell instead will be felt a lot less at Honolua, so hopefully the ladies' contest will have good conditions for their first day of action.

Notice also how the NW buoy just went up a notch: 11.2ft @ 15s from 318° (NW) is a pretty serious reading. That increase should happen in the late afternoon locally.

 

 

Too early in the morning for an updated MC2km map, let's use the Windguru table to point out that the wind is gonna keep blowing. I circled three major swells, but all those storms/fetches are not getting close enough to the islands to kill the local trades.

We can see that also in the wind map below that shows:
- a big and strong fetch (the Wednesday's swell one) that is now shooting more at California than at us, but we'll still get the angular spreading
- a solid trade wind area extending from 10 to 25 degrees of north latitude all across the North Pacific
- a tiny fetch down south. Too small to do anything for us, but it's there... I HAVE to circle it!