Robby Naish
Yet another early season large swell arrived in Hawaii yesterday, bringing winter-like large surf to Maui in September. This is going to have to go down as an all time epic September for wave sailing on Maui.
This latest north swell had much more of a westerly component to it than the previous north swells we’ve been getting over the last month. Not as good of a set up for either Kanaha or Hookipa. The westerly component to the waves combined with offshore wind can make for some tricky conditions.
Conditions on the north shore looked a bit squally early on yesterday so I didn’t bother to head down the hill to the beach until after noon. Kanaha turned out to be a strong 5.0 for me on average, but at times that was half a meter too big, at times a full meter too small.
The set waves rolling in looked promising, but turned out to be pretty bumpy, maybe due to the combination west component mixed with the strong east wind swell. The end result was conditions that were kind of weird, some fun rides at times, but not as epic a day the earlier days this month.
Up the coast at Hookipa, the sets were a bit larger and meatier -easily over mast high in the bigger sets. With most of the PWA pros sitting around Sylt freezing their butts off waiting for wind, the local Hookipa windsurfers had it relatively uncrowded. Once again the action was dominated by Robby Naish, Keith Teboul, Luke and Levi Siver. Didn’t get a lot of photos but here’s what I did get. Look for video of yesterday’s action here in a few days.
