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The last week of the year is when I remind the readers that they can
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you.
On Christmas day I did one of my three sessions with a Gopro on the paddle and this is an interesting little sequence I'd like to share. The foil I'm riding is a AFS Silk 650 on a 80cm mast and, like a Takuma Kujira v1, it's a Laurent Borgna design with humpback whales inspired tubercles. If you overfoil (aka breach) with the whole leading edge, the top of the tubercles ventilate first while the bottom of them still generate lift. The result is a small loss of lift, which in turns make the foil drop a bit of altitude (as opposed to suddenly losing all the lift and make you crash onto the water) and automatically re-engage. This feature saved me from many overfoil crashes so far.
In this occasion though, not even the tubercles helped. I was doing a front side turn to the left and only half of the foil came close to the surface and ventilated.
As a result, that half of the foil dropped in altitude and that made the foil roll to the right enough that I ended up losing my balance to the inside of the turn and do the so called "Taco", one of the most dangerous way to fall while foiling. The only way not to have this happen is not to make the foil ventilate at all, hence to keep it deeper in the water. Longer masts help with that, but in the end it's the pilot that has to do the right thing and keep the plane flying deep enough into the water.
7am Surfline significant buoy readings and discussion. South shore
North shore
NW101
- 13.3ft, 15s, NW 315º
- 5.5ft, 9s, NNW 330º
Waimea
- 11.7ft, 14s, NNW 330º
- 4.8ft, 10s, NNW 345º
- 2.7ft, 17s, NNW 335º
Pauwela
- 8.5ft, 14s, NNW 340º
- 3.2ft, 17s, NW 325º
- 5.5ft, 8s, N 5º
As predicted, the NW swell jumped up at Waimea and Pauwela in the 14s bracket, while there's already 17s readings of the next pulse, so it should be even bigger tomorrow (look at the NW reading). Home guess for Hookipa is double to triple overhead and no wind in the early morning (light onshore for the rest of the day). Seek sheltered places.
Wind map at noon (2 days old). The other ones can be found here.
Fetches map (circles legend: red: direct aim, blue: angular spreading, black: blocked, yellow: possibly over the ice sheet) from Windy.
North Pacific (about 4 days travel time from the NW corner of the North Pacific):
South Pacific (about 7 days travel time from east/west of New Zealand):
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