Fiji Pro 2014 Forecast
Also, who's got the official forecast? I assume surfline? Shouldn't they be putting up forecasts within a week of the comp?
Current indications are not good. There's a solid swell (6-8ft) due a few days before the start of the waiting period, but it's expected to ease rapidly by the time the event gets underway. A great big blocking pattern is setting up camp across the primary swell window, which suggests the first half of the waiting period will be on the small side.
I haven't had a chance to do an in-depth analysis yet but will give it a crack this evening if I get some time.
Yeah actually when I wrote the post above I didn't realise the Girls had their own waiting period before the Mens (I thought they ran concurrently, as per other events). As such the 6-8ft swell I mentioned will land smack bang in the middle of their waiting period, and there'll probably be some bigger bombs at times - wouldn't be surprised to see the odd ten footer here and there. This will be bloody good viewing!
Womens Round 1 is in the water with lumpy 3-5ft surf. I'm a little surprised they're running today, seeing that the waves are a little wobbly and winds are a little funky - and especially with 2-3 days of bigger, cleaner surf ahead. Late Wed and early Thurs should be an easy 6-8ft+ with bigger cleanup sets in the 10ft range.
I can't see them running the girls at cloudbreak at the peak of this swell Wed/Thurs. Too big and too windy IMO. And normally I'd be pretty happy to see a large semi stationary high in the Tasman but feck me its a major swell killer for the mens comp. Gents comp doesn't look to get anything above 4-5ft from what I can see.
Yeah just watched some of it and its shit. Wobbly sectiony crap.
Is it jacking/doubleing up on the inside because of a tradeswell component?
MV you literally beat me too it. I was just about to ask why the surf is so wobbly, sectiony. The girls are really struggling to get any length of ride. It's hard to imagine that a 0.4m SSE swell would have that much impact on the 1.6m 14 second SSW swell? But perhaps that is the cause? An 8 sec and 14 sec period swell combining on the goldy always turns it to shit.
Not at all Mitch/Don. Seems that Cloudbreak is such a swell magnet that it doesn't currently fit within any of our current algorithms that forecast the surf from the WaveWatch data.
Set wave heights consistently end up being around 1.5x the forecast height. For example tomorrow's forecast of 6ft+ will probably end up being 8-10ft on the sets.
We'll make tweaks to this in the near future though.
rIGHT, cheers Craig. So you wouldn't disagree that, there does seem to be multiple swells in the water?
Yeah there's short-range S/SE windswell in the water it seems and it's more evident when they're surfing the lower tides on the outer section of the reef. As winds improve we should also see less windswell contamination.
Cool, cheers.I hope they use some of the footage of the chicks charging in ads. Maybe I'm not their target audience though...
Well what do you know.....they're moving the women's comp to restaurants!!!
Kinda funny as Pottz said earlier that "we've been expecting big waves" so the girls are "gonna have to surf at Cloudbreak" (or something along those lines). But prior to that they panned to the tower and the wind looks like it is howling.. can't imagine conditions would be great out there. So Restaurants is a great choice.
Joe Turpel has called it perfection twice now. Bumpy as fuck I reckon.
Hmm, now I'm not so sure. First couple of waves of this heat look really tricky with a lotta bump up the face.
It's called "chatter" Ben!!! But yeah it's a bit average that's for sure. Rosie reckons its due to the outgoing tide.
This isn't fresh news but the girls rip now don't they. So hard surfing on staircases like that and they are smashing it. I saw Bianca live at snapper and she blew me away but for some reason I assumed she would have no forehand. Not sure why I thought that but she is killing it. And Steph , smashing it too.
Interesting to see the ASP's wave height calls over the last few days.
Yesterday was "3-5 foot (1 - 1.5 metre) at Cloudbreak" (stated both in the pre-event morning press release, and the post-event afternoon press release), yet this morning's pre-event email said the surf was "4-6 foot (1.25 - 2 metre) at Restaurants".
However yesterday was more in the 4-6ft range at Cloudbreak (double overhead sets), and Restaurants looks somewhere around 3-4ft (a foot or so overhead on the sets). And this is alongside Surfline calling wave face heights (ie today was "12-15ft at Cloudbreak").
A very confusing message all 'round.
The girls just got pitted in some damn nice looking 4-5ft Restaurants. Waves looking damn good now, more so the sets that's for sure.
Don, I'd say it looks real tricky!
Only 3-4ft, choppy, windy and hard to read.
Also how did Sally's non-barrel wave get higher than Paige's barrel, to huge face gouge wave. No consistency at all.
3-4ft? Check out the water view. Looks at least 4ft+ on those bomb sets in this heat IMO.
Laura Enever smashing it!!!
Would of only called it a solid 4ft, not 5ft. But Malia's wave just then looked more like 5ft.
Jeez it's getting bigger with every heat. That last one was really solid.
Meanwhile at Cloudbreak:
Ross Williams, photo by www.instagram.com/joliphotos
How can restaurants be that windy and cloudbreak not so in that photo above. Doesn't make any sense?
It's pretty windy there at CB Don, the difference being that the reef prevents the chop. Whereas Restaurants has a big body of water to build up chop from the mainland to Tav Is running up the channel
Because the reef inside Cloudbreak extends much further to the east, blocking a lot of the wind chop as shown below, while at Restaurants there's a huge expanse of open water for the wind to blow across and straight into the break.
Turdpel's commentary reminds me of this, (bear with my, trying to link from Billy Birmingham's MySpace!0
<iframe width="300" height="90" src="//media.myspace.com/play/song/scene-9-12th-man-again-explicit-61532008-105022594" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
Scene 9: 12th Man Again (Explicit) from The 12th Man on Myspace.
Aha yes! Just click on this link directly above, then press the play button...
Good to see the girls still in it are having a dig in some testing conditions.
It was tricky yesterday but I kinda thought any of the girls on the CT should have been able to get at least one wave. A bit embarrassing for Lakey Peterson to not even take off.
I guess thats because a lot of the QS events are held in small weak beach breaks and some of the girls that have qualified have never really been tested until now but she may have had one of those really bad heats that happen from time to time I suppose.
I feel sorry for all the other girls on tour, how Carissa Moore got a 9.4 for that wave
is beyond me. No wonder she is unbeatable and has a 5000 point lead.
As for restaurants as a wave well might be great if it was ever smooth but I have
never even seen a picture of it being smooth, but the clown commentators sure
know how to pump it up.Even Potts is starting to annoy the shit out of me.
Would have been good to see them at some solid, less bumpy CB :(
I have to agree the 9.4 was overscored but at least the judges are just as shit on the women's tour as they are on the mens. I did hear Richie Porter's name mentioned so there might just be the answer, a head judge that can fcuk up the best of them at any time and in any conditions. Take Double J's 10 at Bells for instance and then the feeble way he explained it later.
If the ASP want some credibility they need to show him the door and get some consistency in the judging but we've been harping on about that issue for ages now and it seems to fall on deaf ears
Great idea by the ASP splitting the mens and womens. There is just not enough of a window to run both those events together. By the way Craig is Joli's dispute settled with ASP? He only has 9694 followers - plus 1 more now....but thats pretty low for the legend
The heat between Sally Fitz, Paige Hareb, and Laura Enever had some wild judging, and it also showed how the scaling system is flawed. At present the judges scale the scores to the conditions they see on the day; if the surf's good they'll rathchet the scale down, if it's bad they'll ramp it up a bit. Which is what they did in the aforementioned heat, which admitedly was looking dire for the first 15 minutes. When Sally got a 9.07 for racing a few sections and then doing a turn they must've thought it'd be the wave of the heat. Except the surf turned on straight after that and there were a fistful of waves surfed better than Sally's. They had to edge close to ten points just to fit the scores into the scale they'd chosen at the start of the heat.
Yep, saw that as well Stu, totally jumped the gun, and there were way better waves than Sally's first 9.07 surfed, especially Paige's follow up 8.something.
After that heat the pulled back the scoring again...
Re Joli, not sure and I'm guessing not.
I love watching the Pro's surf. Both the guys and girls. But the commentating has got to the stage where I simply cant listen to it! Its so full of clichés and Pottz is going to send me insane.
Im actually embarrassed for him. Add the horrendously inconsistent judging and its lights out for goofy.
Rant over
The ASP highlight video is way clearer than what Fuel tv showed and it seems to show the girls surfing a lot better ,i wonder if the judges see the same footage which would explain the scoring differences.
Might be jumping the gun a bit but the Girls waiting period starts this weekend.
What's the chance of a mega swell!?
The one good thing about Rio is that it makes Fiji all the sweeter! Looking forward to this one.