The traffic made me stop at Thousand Peaks and I had the most relaxing session with the longboard and glassy (till 1pm!) perfect shaped waist high waves. Chat with a good friend and a lovely lady helped.
At the same time, the windsurfers were tackling Hookpa and this photo by Jimmie Hepp shows well the size of the waves.
The NW and Waimea buoys graphs show continuous decline of size. The 4am readings are respectively:
4.9ft @ 10s from 322° (NW)
1.8ft @ 7s from 312° (NW)
3.3ft @ 11s from 326° (NW)
3.3ft @ 10s from 327° (NW)
and that's pretty much what we could expect the Pauwela buoy to be reading too if it was still there. That's a fun size, probably solid head high with occasional overhead sets, stay tuned for the beach report later.
Talking about the Pauwela buoy, here's some good news from Pat Caldwell:"The Pauwela, Maui buoy will likely be re-deployed next week". Cheers to that.
MC2km map at noon shows more wind than yesterday.
Wind map shows only one of the two lows it showed yesterday and its associated fetch is neither strong or big. Still it's better than no fetches at all, but the wave size will be below average next week.
Nice couple of fetches down south, definitely some waves next weekend.
I feel like spending a few words for the "surprising" southern energy we had the past couple of days. As I said, I'm testing computers and I've been posting from a couple of different ones. As a consequence, I have my saved weather maps scattered all over the place and I failed spotting (or more precisely, reminding you guys) of the possibility of a south swell. The fact that the NW swell was pretty big and it was masking the readings at the southerly exposed buoys didn't help.
But the size of the waves I surfed (and saw on the cam) yesterday, made me go look on this exact blog and scroll down to a week ago to see how the wind maps looked like down south. I didn't post it on March 25, but here's how March 24 and 26 looked like.
It's always those lows closer than the usual corner ESE of New Zealand that catch me off guard. I forget how important a closer distance to the source is for the size of the waves.
Anyway, the second map is clearly weaker, so today that energy should be less than yesterday.
As a matter of fact, Barbers only shows 1.1ft @ 15s from 177° (S), while yesterday it was twice as big.
Lanai reads 1.6ft @ 14s from 222° (SW) and that is coming from the tasman sea fetch that you guys can see in the last picture (this time look SW of New Zealand) and in fact it was pretty clear yesterday that there were two swells in the water coming from a slightly different angle.
As always, I strongly recommend to check the lahaina webcam before driving over there.
Thursday March 24.
Saturday March 26.
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