The news of the day is obviously the gnarly wipeout at Backdoor that almost took Dusty Payne's life. Below is the Surfline cams video collage that shows it from different angles. He was unconscious under water for a minute and 12 seconds before the first guys that got to him could pull his head out. And even after that, he was probably unconscious for quite a bit longer. He was really lucky that the water photographer saw the wipeout and kept an eye on him. When he didn't see him coming up, he started yelling to attract the attention of the other surfers and the lifeguards and it's amazing how quickly everybody reacted. It's a bit of a miracle that he's alive, imo.
I took this two frames from this other video to analyze the wipeout. As you can see, the drop was extremely steep, his board is pretty much vertical and the back two thirds of his inside rail are nicely in contact with the water, about to knife into it.
But somehow (not sure if not enough toe pressure or a little bump or both), the front part of the inside rail doesn't set, the board goes flat and the outside rail ends up catching.
This is an article where you can read some more details.
From another article instead, I took this other sad news about an accident that happened just a couple of hours later: About 11:45 a.m., a surfer died after getting into trouble off Rocky Point. The surfer was said to be in his 50s or 60s.
The Surfline buoy page is not working at this time, instead of checking the useless NOAA buoys, I'd rather report the Surfline forecast instead, since it still tells us what's in the water much more reliably. Today we're dealing with 3.3f 12s from 306 at 8am (losing a second during the rest of the day), with the addition of 6f 8s of easterly windswell. That's still head high at Hookipa, stay tuned for a beach report.
Here's also Pat Caldwell's table for Oahu, and his discussion's summary was: Waves conforming to the calendar. I love it.
Wind map shows ESE trades and in my opinion is a bit optimistic with the original wind direction that you can observe offshore the Hana coast. If it was a Sunday, I would call no sailing at Hookipa because of too many surfers in the water. It's a week day instead, but the chances are still pretty slim, IMO.
North Pacific shows the strong NW fetch I pointed out yesterday getting closer (12f 15s Thursday night) and the start of a new WNW one that will evolve into a much closer one and generate the weekend giant swell (20.6f 16s).
South Pacific shows a small fetch.
Morning sky looks pretty clear. In the top left corner, you can see the first band of clouds of an approaching front associated with the low NW of us.
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