Thursday, May 19, 2016

5 19 16 morning call

Went Lahaina side yesterday and had a fun but slow session in the morning.
The swell was reading 1-1.5f 15s from 175 and, unusually, Maalaea had the most size. The direction was the reason for that, I'll elaborate more later in this post.
I stopped there to read a book a wait for the tide to drop a bit. This is the set that made me paddle out.


This is a random quote from the Eckhart Tolle book I'm reading (highlighter action not mine). Really good read.


5am significant buoy readings.
NW
5.4ft @ 8s from 101° (ESE)
2.6ft @ 7s from 105° (ESE)
1.7ft @ 14s from 159° (SSE)

Pauwela
4.2ft @ 8s from 70° (ENE)           
2.4ft @ 5s from 60° (ENE)

Lanai
1.5ft @ 13s from 185° (S)
1.3ft @ 16s from 212° (SW)

Barbers
3.2ft @ 14s from 178° (S)

Pure windswell at the Pauwela buoy, I think I'll drive south again. South swell went down in period (and a little west), new south swell is here, but only 1.3f 16s. As a matter of fact, the webcam (hookipa on the left, lahaina on the right) doesn't show much.


Wind map shows the usual windswell fetch and a tiny NW one that won't do much.


South Pacific shows another solid Tasman Sea fetch, it's been a good start of the season for Fiji.


Today's swell, in fact, produced some amazing waves at Cloudbreak on Monday, which you can admire in this feature on Surfline. Wave n.9 is from Reef McIntosh, which was one of the two surfers out (together with Mark Healey) that day in 2011 when I could witness 40f face waves from the channel. He was pulling into some water caverns and coming out without even claiming. We were jumping out of our skin on the boat instead. Photos from that day are on the external disk, one day I'll retrieve them.
Wait, what am I talking about? Of course they're on the blog and you can check out the whole trip report here.

Now let's have a look at why yesterday's swell was hitting Maalaea so well. Below is the map of the 11th and the fetch on the right is strong but shooting more to the east of the islands. We got some angular spreading, which gave the sets a character of inconsistency and a perfect direction of 175.


This other one is from the day after, the 12. The fetch on the right was oriented even more towards the east, so we shouldn't get much from that today, but we should get more energy (compared to yesterday) from the one from the Tasman sea. Always a lottery to try to guess the size of those swells.


Another windy day depicted by the two models at the bottom of the Windguru page.

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