Are forecasts reliable for Daklha?

[vannibombonato]

As per subject,
we are considering a last minute kite trip in October based on forecasts, and Daklha is one of the candidates.

In your experience, are forecasts reliable for that spot?

Thanks

[nothing2seehere]

Based on solely one weeks worth of experience (last week) so take it with a pinch of scepticism - not really. The best you can get is a feel for which kit to take with you. GFS (at a massive 22km radius) seems to get updated fairly regularly (maybe every 6 hours) but the other forecasts seemed to be generated only once a day so you can be using data thats 18 hours old on a day where the wind is supposed to swing.

As an example. Last Thursday the forecast was for E 14knots in the morning swinging to N 17knots in the late afternoon. The actual wind was E 25+ knots in the morning and E 16 knots in the afternoon. If you looked at the wind patterns you could see that there was nothing to bring the wind shift that was predicted so we discounted this. On my (one weeks haha) experience, you want the Northerly wind for consistent strong winds, the other directions are a bit less predictable as to what will actually happen compared to the forecast.

But probably what you want to know is how much we got out. I kited 5 days out of 6. 7 and 9m first 3 days and 12m last 2 days. Middle day was a rest day where with a different tide or more enthusiasm I could have found somewhere to kite (was offshore at the hotel I was staying at but onshore at resorts on the other side of the bay)