Saturday, February 22, 2020

Saturday 2 22 20 morning call

Saturday 2 29 at the MACC the International Windsurfing Tour movie "Riders of the liquid plains" will premiere at 7.30pm (food available before that). Should be a good one.


This is my pick of Jimmie Hepp's album of the daily action at Hookipa.


4am significant buoy readings and discussion
South shore
Not much at Barbers, check the Lahaina webcam if interested.

North shore
NW001
3.2ft @ 15s from 313° (NW)

Hanalei
1.3ft @ 18s from 318° (NW)

Waimea
1.1ft @ 18s from 320° (NW)

Pauwela
6.6ft @ 9s from 81° (E)
3ft @ 5s from 81° (E)
2.8ft @ 11s from 359° (N)            
 
New NW swell on the rise all day, although a lot smaller than forecasted by the WW3 model. Here's how Pat Caldwell described the evolution of the fetch.
A zonal jet stream has held this week. Such patterns steer surface low pressure systems rapidly east, which reduces surf potential. The second in a pair of events is due on Saturday.
The first event generated 2/16-17 east of the Date Line is steadily dropping 2/21. It should fade out by Saturday.
The source for the second event, due locally Saturday, formed east of the Kuril Islands 2/17-18. It started off with severe gales over the 300-315 degree band. The winds weakened to gales as it crossed the Date Line 2/19 and moved east of the Hawaii swell window 2/20.
The onset at NOAA NW Hawaii buoys 51001 and 51101 is slow relative to the Wave Watch III prediction, which also called too early and too high the first event aforementioned. This suggests surf locally to build Saturday morning instead of Friday night as the models suggest. The event should be filled in by Saturday PM from 300-330 degrees. It should peak overnight Saturday night just below average, with a slow decline into Monday from 315-345 degrees.

With no computer, I didn't save the fetches maps, so we don't have the important support of those to help follow uncle Pat's narrative. What counts is that with only 3ft 15s at the NW buoy, we shouldn't expect much out of this event. Hanalei (back online since a few days) and Waimea only show 1ft 18s, so the early morning locally will mostly see the easterly 9s period energy. Hookipa will have relatively small (still possibly head high) and clean waves, eastern exposures will have bigger size. The NW swell will start to be visible locally only in the afternoon.

The trades will finally give us a break for the next three mornings, before returning with average strength on Tuesday and before becoming pretty strong again over the next weekend.

Wind map at noon (the other ones can be found at link n.-2 of GP's meteo websites list in the right column).

North Pacific has a wide but not particularly intense yet NW fetch and a small windswell one. The NW fetch should intensify and generate and extra large swell that Surfline predicts to peak at 12ft 15s from 325 on Wednesday morning.


South Pacific sill has the S-SSE fetch we saw yesterday (the Tasman Sea one is gone).


Morning sky.

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