9 16 16 morning call

Another pretty magic day of surfing on the Lahaina side for me. 2.2f 15s at the buoy and solid head high sets in the (still dirty) water.

Meanwhile, the windsurfers enjoyed a good day at Hookipa. Photo by Jimmie Hepp.

 

 Still some leftover head high sets at sunset.

We got lucky yesterday, but that big cloud I pointed out is still just out there.

And there's a lot of rain, just offshore of us. Not trying to predict the rain. I don't have the skill or the interest. Just reporting how it looks this early morning.

 Significant buoy readings 4am
NW

6.9ft @ 7s from 78° (ENE)

2.6ft @ 15s from 260° (W)

Waimea

2.1ft @ 11s from 338° (NNW)

0.6ft @ 15s from 268° (W)

0.2ft @ 20s from 341° (NNW)

Pauwela
6.2ft @ 7s from 58° (ENE) 

Really west (and weird) directions at the NW and Waimea buoy, I don't really know how to explain them. Judging from the position the fetch had, the swell should arrive from a WNW direction, but 260 and 268 are way more west than that. Plus that .2f 20s from 341 doesn't make much sense either, but it's so small that it could be a glitch.
IF those readings are correct, the start of the swell will be from such a westerly direction that we might not see anything at all today in Maui.
But I kinda question the correctness of them and I would recommend you guys to check the buoys later in the day, to see if those numbers are just temporary and the direction goes more north.
I'm puzzled and I'm gonna just add that Surfline predicts 1f 18s at 2pm and 2f 16s at 8pm today for Maui. The direction of their prediction is 322, but that is after the swell has refracted over the upstream islands.
We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

Lanai
2ft @ 14s from 202° (SSW) 

SSW swell went down a bit, but it's still there. I'm afraid that until they remove those cars flooded at Grandma's, the drive to and from Lahaina will have a long line of cars because of the curious drivers rubber necking (I learned this expression in the lineup yesterday) when passing by.

MC2km maps not updated yet, I'm gonna use the two models at the bottom of the windguru page to show that today and tomorrow should be two days of strong easterly winds. The image also show a lot of cloud cover and rain.

Current wind map shows a weak remnant of the NW fetch responsible for today's swell, a windswell fetch and nothing down south. That's gonna be the case for quite a few days unfortunately, and after the angular spreading of the strong zonal fetch we have observed in the last couple of days (peaking at 2.5f 16s next Wednesday according to Surfline), the South Pacific is going to take a break of at least a week.
Didn't see much in the northern hemisphere either. After this weekend's swell, the end of September is going to be below average.