A longboard and a shortboard session for me yesterday. The fact that I completely eliminated windsurfing, windfoiling, SUP and SUP foiling out of my "diet" in order to try to heal my trigger fingers, obviously leaves me with a lot less alternatives: pretty much only surfing (and prone foiling, which I'm not a great fan of). That makes me take the drive to the Bay without any effort because often it's the only clean surf I can find and that is just great. I sure never surfed it this often like this winter. Here's a few photos.
As usual, the windsurfers where enjoying the windy waves at Hookipa instead. Here's my pick out of this gallery by Jimmie Hepp (I always go for the wave more than the move).
4am significant buoy readings
South shore
Lanai
1.6ft @ 14s from 204° (SSW)
Still signs of the small southerly energy at Lanai, now down to 14s. Yesterday it was pretty solid knee to waist, so hopefully today there's still knee to thigh high stuff. Actually Ala Moana has occasional head high waves like the one in the picture below, but it's always bigger over there. Hopefully soon we'll have a webcam in Lahaina again, so we won't need to guess looking at other islands.
North shore
NW101
4.8ft @ 8s from 71° (ENE)
3.7ft @ 11s from 16° (NNE)
3.4ft @ 10s from 24° (NNE)
3.3ft @ 7s from 67° (ENE)
Hanalei
6ft @ 13s from 337° (NNW)
4.8ft @ 9s from 353° (N)
Waimea
4.9ft @ 13s from 351° (N)
2.9ft @ 8s from 23° (NNE)
2.6ft @ 9s from 6° (N)
2.3ft @ 10s from 356° (N)
Pauwela
5.6ft @ 13s from 336° (NNW)
4.1ft @ 8s from 45° (NE)
3.4ft @ 9s from 16° (NNE)
2.8ft @ 10s from 337° (NNW)
No NW energy at the NW buoy is a sign that the energy of this wonderful swell is dissipating. But the upstream island buoys still show solid numbers, so the downward trend is not going to be particularly rapid. Below is the graphs of the four reported buoys together with the Surfline forecast. We start the day with 5.6ft 13s from 336, let's hope we finish it with still something like 4.5ft 12s.
Oh yeah, what does that mean in terms of size? Well, it depends where. What do you want to know, Sand Piles, Big Left, the Harbor, Pier One, Kanaha, Sprecks, Paia Bay, Kuau or Hookipa? How about the west side spots? Or Hana? Obviously, I do have a pretty good guess about all of the above, but I'm always going to refrain to do a spot specific forecast, as it would take me too much time to manually write that down every day.
The "official" forecast sites offer automatically generated spot specific predictions, but they are often inaccurate, as they are based on near shore models that don't know as much as a local who has been observing buoy readings for years. And that's what I want to instill in my readers: develop their own knowledge based on the offshore swell readings that I report here and soon you'll know better than that. I'll do an exception for Hookipa, that will be well overhead and not particularly clean with the mix of swells that we have in the water. Pretty windy too.
Wind map at noon.
North Pacific offers a fairly strong new NW fetch in the Kamchatka corner (6ft 15s on Thursday out of it) and a much smaller NNE one.
Nothing from the south.
Morning sky.
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