Saturday 4 20 19 morning call

The funding campaign for the new Lahaina harbor webcam has raised $1685. Thanks a lot and let's keep them coming. I'm gonna start my posts with an update like this until it reaches its goal of $2,000. Please donate to the page, not to me. I have nothing to do with this campaign, other than the fact that I totally support the cause.

Three shortboard and one longboard session for me yesterday. I was off and I knew this was going to be one of the last days of good waves, so I milked it till my arms dropped. This is how Honolua looked when I arrived after my first Hookipa session: head high and building. I hit the water right away.

In the afternoon the swell built up to an extremely fun head and a half size.

Most likely, he's going to have to wait until next winter for a vision like that. Once again, you never know. There'll be plenty more swells on the north shore of course, but you guys know how picky the Bay is with direction, size, period and everything else.

Let's now jump to Jimmie Hepp's windsurfing shots. He was celebrating 10 years of shooting Hookipa. On this blog I've been posting photos of it (and everything else) since 2005 and when Jimmie came along I was very relieved: finally someone else was posting shots on a "free" site (Facebook) and with a much better camera, so that I didn't have to do it! Thank you Jimmie for your hard work.
This is my wave-based pick of his gallery of the day.

Today I also had to pick one based on the move. Guadalupe's Antoine Martin is the most entertaining windsurfer in the world in my opinion. His skills are mad and he's mad too! This is a backloop off the lip (which means he's riding the wave, hitting the lip and throwing a backloop in front of it. A maneuver of a degree of difficulty I can't even grasp. You land one like this in a contest, it's an automatic 10.


Back to my sessions, here's a couple of gropro shots on two different super duper "secret" lefts. Good luck with the guessing!

4am significant buoy readings
South shore
Barbers
1.5ft @ 14s from 202° (SSW)

Lanai
1.5ft @ 13s from 229° (SW)

Background energy still there. Yesterday the Lahaina side was tiny (but not flat) and judging from what I see at the Kihei webcam, this is going to be the case also today. Very soon the Lahaina cam will be online, please keep the donations coming.

North shore
NW101
2.3ft @ 11s from 344° (NNW)

2.1ft @ 10s from 336° (NNW)

Hanalei
2.4ft @ 11s from 345° (NNW)

Waimea
2ft @ 11s from 331° (NNW)

Pauwela
5.3ft @ 8s from 80° (E)

3.9ft @ 11s from 332° (NNW)

 

Below is the graph of Pauwela together with yesterday's Surfline forecast. You can see how the swell peaked earlier than the forecast, so today we can expect much smaller size than yesterday afternoon and declining. That is also confirmed by the readings of all the upstream buoys. Make good use if it, because after that it's going to me mostly windswell (with some possible low NW energy here and there) for at least a couple of weeks.

Wind map at noon.


North Pacific only has a weak windswell fetch.

Nothing of relevance from the south either, pretty horrible day of wave generation for Hawaii. That's totally normal, in the transition seasons (fall and spring) you can have both sides of the Pacific firing or both of them dormant.

Morning sky.