Foiling: wave energy rather than wave size?

1

Most people talk about wave size.
I wonder if wave energy is actually more important when discussing foil size selection.
Most forecast show waves height and period.
Windy.app , and some others perhaps, have the option of showing wave energy forecast in kJ.

To me that seems a lot more important since we’re more in touch with the wave energy than any other water crafts.

Locally for example 35 knots days
-on the Great Lakes it’s about 500kJ range,
-on smaller lakes about 50kJ
-Nazare today 200kJ
-Hookipa & Pipeline that 3500kJ

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1 Like
2

Yup. I feel like the KJ Reading is really important. Makes a big difference when foiling.

3

i think both need to be taken into account but yes, generally longer period swells travel faster. i asked the swellnet forecasters about this years ago. good pickup :wink:

4

Ya John for sure. Erik had a post about this a while back and totally makes sense. The other day my home spot lit up pretty good from an odd direction, giving a much longer fetch. Though the waves were still on the small side, it was crazy how much more energy they had.

5

I completely missed that post and can’t find it using the search. Do you have the link to the post?

6

I also tried looking but wasn’t able to track it down. I’ll try looking again tonight.

7

If you don’t know what 6’ at 8 sec and 6’ at 18 sec will provide and look like, yes KJ will help anticipating what you will face and what you should bring as gear. That is 6’ at 18 sec
Halloween1

8

Yes I like the discussion about kj - The oldmaneaves.com app will allow users to discover this metric with a simple UI