Tuesday 2 25 20 morning call

No photos from yesterday, this is a wonderful human being called Josh Bogle who, with no legs and almost no hands, recently started surfing and is obviously enjoying it. Thanks for the inspiration, brother! Photo by Tomoko.

4am significant buoy readings and discussion
South shore
Barbers
1ft @ 14s from 230° (SW)
A tiny bit of long period SW energy at Barbers, check the Lahaina webcam to see what’s there (not much).

North shore
NW001
7.4ft @ 11s from 325° (NW)

5.9ft @ 18s from 358° (N)

4.7ft @ 10s from 355° (N)

Hanalei

6.2ft @ 12s from 333° (NNW)

1ft @ 20s from 346° (NNW)

Waimea

5.4ft @ 12s from 332° (NNW)

Pauwela

4.4ft @ 9s from 84° (E)

2.3ft @ 5s from 69° (ENE)

2.2ft @ 12s from 328° (NW)

0.4ft @ 20s from 340° (NNW)

Lots of new energies at the buoys, some of which on unclear sources. Pat Caldwell didn’t post his usual narrative, which would have helped greatly to shed some light on them, so I’ll try to figure it our myself.

Let’s first focus on the 11-12s energy. The readings at the upstream buoys show that that is going to rise locally throughout the day, some 12 hours before the long period one.
Below is the collage of the fetch maps of Feb 22, 23and 24. My best guess is that this energy comes from the head of the fetch that was pretty close to the islands on the 24th. I circled it in blue, as it’s an angular spreading one. The long period swell comes from farther away, both spatially and temporally. I originally circled the fetch in red, and now added a red arrow to indicate it.

Below is the collage of the graphs of NW and Pauwela, together with the Surfline forecast. I left the indication of the shorter period prediction on the last one: 5.6ft 11s at noon, which seems very much in line with the upstream buoys readings. The much bigger long period swell (first indicated in light blue and the in dark blue) instead, is predicted to only pick up during the night (only 2ft 20 at 6pm), but the buoys seem to show an earlier timing. 6ft 18s at 4am at the NW buoy, in fact, will take only 14h to get here, which means that sunset time should see much more energy that what Surfline thinks.

In other simpler words, the energy should pick up steadily all day, first much more noticeable in the 11-12s band and then with much longer period (18-20s) in the afternoon. Hookipa should have waves already in the morning, I’m not even going to try to guess the size, but I will report from the beach before 7.30am. Uff, thank god not every day the calls are this difficult!