Tuesday 10 17 17 morning call

Great day of action for me yesterday. The south swell was slow (they always are because of the long distance of travelling, but the angular spreading ones like this one are even more inconsistent), but when the set came there was some solid size at select spots. I surfed one of them and managed to catch this absolute gem.


Here's a challenging drop from a fellow surfer.


After that I joined my friend Kathy for a SUP foiling session that had some moments of epicness. Doesn't look epic to you? That's because you're looking at it with the eyes of the surfer.


Let's see if this helps you understand the beauty of foiling. The clip below shows a wave that was waist high at the takeoff and knee high for the rest of it. Not only it was knee high, but it was so soft that the only other vessel that could have ridden it all the way, is a one man canoe. It would have done that by going straight to the shore though, instead of going left and right (which means, I was going much faster than a straight line to the shore).
At the end I could have cut back left again and beach it, but there were three surfers on my line and I made a personal rule to not get anywhere close to regular surfers when I'm on the foil.
Enjoy the quietness.


Still not convinced?
Then look at the epic surfing wave of the first image. It was head high (well overhead at the take off), clean, blue and with a perfect line. It was obviously a great pleasure to ride it on my newly acquired Tom Parrish 6.10 step-up (craigslist screaming deal!).
Then look again at the super soft knee high wave I rode in the video clip.
Well, I know it's hard to believe, but I had more fun on the second one. Because I felt like a Pelikan gliding in front of the wave, like in the image below. We do a very similar thing on the foil. They use the lift of the air being pushed by face of the wave, we use the lift of the water being pushed by it.


But since everyone is different and like different things, I'll keep reporting about all the water sports and here's Jimmie Hepp's photo of the windsurfers at Hookipa from this gallery, which he very aptly called "big and bumpy".


Unfortunately, the surfline page reporting all the buoys (link n.11 of the GP's meteo websites list on the right) is down again, so I got to get creative here.
Why do I like that page so much? Look at what you get if you go on the NOAA page of the W buoy, for example. Do you see any sign of the southerly energy? No, because the dominant one is the windswell pounding at a solid 8-9f 10s. If you only check the buoys in this way, you would never know that there is a south swell.
Surfline instead takes the raw data from the same buoy and separates all the different swells that are hitting that buoy.
Since that page is down today, we'll have to go by the forecast that is still calling for declining 3f 15s for today.



For the north shore I'm gonna use this plot by PacIOOS instead. 10f 10s are the impressive numbers of the "windswell" still pumping also today. Notice the change of the direction to 39, which reflects yesterday's and today's fetches orientation. If it wasn't for the wind creating chop on the breaking waves, that would have been an epic direction for all the rights on Maui's north shore. The kind of direction that allows you to catch a wave at Green Trees and kickout in the channel.


Wind map at noon shows again strong trades. Kihei should be sheltered again.


North Pacific shows a strong fetch oriented towards Alaska. We might get some angular spreading out of it, but yesterday's fetch was the one that generated the most energy aimed at us. The related NW swell is forecasted by Surfline to peak at 6.4f 16s from 345 on Friday 8am. Good direction for the Bay.


South Pacific shows a beautiful wide fetch SE of New Zealand. Very distant though, so only a couple of feet of long period swell predicted by Surfline in a week.


Morning sky.