How common do you think rogue waves are?

[Tomi]

anybody experience one on the great lakes? I can see how the wakes from ship traffic combined with winds could create one, but I haven't seen it....yet!

[boatman61]

Never... have seen the odd near double the norm seemingly to rise vertically out of no where... real PITA when you hit it.. but a Perfect Storm thingy.. Nope..

[mbianka]

Wonder why they never seem to make it to shore? Seems a 95 foot wave hitting the beach might get somebody's attention.

[boatman61]

Originally Posted by mbianka

Wonder why they never seem to make it to shore? Seems a 95 foot wave hitting the beach might get somebody's attention.

McNamara Surfing a 100 foot wave on 1-29-2013 - YouTube

[MarkJ]

Rogue wives??





.

[Pauls]

Don't have any idea how common they are. They do exist, I've experienced two, one seen clearly, the other unseen and just experienced.

The seen wave was mid channel between Catalina and San Clemente Islands, that is about 40 miles offshore. By the local coast guard weather station it had been blowing a steady 45, gusting 55 the previous night. We left the next morning, wind was down to about 25. The seas were 10-12', short wave length and steep like you see right after a storm. It was very clear, maybe 10:00 AM when we spotted the wave. We could see it a long way off, it looked like the horizon but was too close for that. It was a long grey line. From the time we first spotted it until it reached us was several minutes. When it got close enough to see clearly these things could be observed: it was moving in train with the other waves, it was not a product of cross seas impacting each other because there were no cross seas, and its face was really, really steep, more like a breaker forming up on a beach than a deep ocean wave. As it got close to us it was starting to go concave and I could see that it was going to break. It did break, just in front of our bow, and we hit this huge wall of falling white water. I can tell you that we had solid water at least 20' high over the top of the boat judging by a short mast 17' above the waterline which had a 3' length of bronze rod for lightning protection mounted at its head. We later found the rod bent straight back by the force of the water. I did my best to estimate the wave height later by estimating angles and distance and came up with a height of 45'.

The second wave I never saw, just experienced. I was on board the USS San Jose, an approx. 560' Navy ship in the South China Sea. It was rough, we were taking a good sized sea on the port beam. Sometime after midnight, I was in my rack, the ship took a very heavy roll to starboard and just kept rolling. Guys were falling out of their racks, a set of lockers tore off the bulkhead and fell across the compartment. She kept rolling, slowed, finally paused, and just lay there for several seconds before slowly starting to recover. Next morning I checked with a buddy who had been on watch on the bridge. We had a recording inclinometer. According to it the roll stopped 3 degrees short of the point of vanishing stability for our state of loading at that time. She was obviously very close to going over, judging from the sluggishness of her roll recovery.

My conclusions? There are waves out there can roll any boat. The second one damn near rolled a good sized ship. The one I saw, because it was daytime and clear, I was able to take head on. If it had been night I don't think I'd be here writing this. That wave, taken broadside, would roll anything small enough to be called a boat.

I've decided that I want a boat strong enough to take this kind of a hit and stay together. And I want a boat that will right itself after capsize. At the time of the wave I saw I was designing a cat for long distance cruising. This experience converted me to monohulls.

[tomfl]

Originally Posted by mbianka

Wonder why they never seem to make it to shore? Seems a 95 foot wave hitting the beach might get somebody's attention.

There are places like

Mavericks

and the boatie's link where big waves hit the shore. When there is an off shore wind that blows the wave face up and the wave face steeper it turns into a very dangerous surfer's paradise. The way I understand it these are not really rogue waves, rather the result of far off storms that build up fairly large waves at sea that greatly increase in size when the hit the shallower water close to shore. These waves tend to come in sets, and as all surfers know waves in a set are not all the same size, but the difference in wave height is more like a few feet higher, not 80% higher or even more.

I am not sure what happens at a place like the

Window

is a true rogue wave, but these waves get very big and do not always seem to come in sets. But they do seem to be some what the result of the funnel like cliffs there.

In any case so far it is interesting to me that few folks seem to claim they have seen a single huge wave hit them out of no where.

Thanks to all who have added to the signal or the noise. Additional comments welcome.

[klmmicro]

While conducting an UNREP in the north Pacific on a cruiser, the entire forward fueling station detail was washed off their feet and thrown across the deck by a freak wave. Windy conditions of about 25 to 30 knots, about 15 to 20 foot swells moving along the surface. Both ships holding course without much issue when a 40+ (not sure how big it actually was) foot wave came along on a completely different heading and broke over the bow.

I was on that crew and it is a miracle that none of us went overboard. We were all freaked out and it had us rubber necking for the rest (thankfully shortened) of the evolution. 2 feet of water flowing across the deck does not seem like a lot until you are on deck at the same time it is!

A friend of mine was on the bridge crew and watched the whole event from upon high. Even the captain let out a bit of an expletive a few seconds before it hit. Nothing could be done as we were essentially attached to another ship and in restricted maneuvering. We made an emergency break away and finshined replenishing a few days later.

We called it a "rogue wave". It was much bigger than the other waves and it was not following a predictable course when it hit us.

[Pelagic]

Perhaps one of the practical and economic reasons government agencies are vague about counting the frequency of rogue waves is because like lightning strikes....... Nothing you can do about it.

Other than reducing load limits in winter conditions.... Shipping companies still need to traverse those areas.... Yachts are not important.

[tomfl]

Originally Posted by Pelagic

Perhaps one of the practical and economic reasons government agencies are vague about counting the frequency of rogue waves is because like lightning strikes....... Nothing you can do about it.

Other than reducing load limits in winter conditions.... Shipping companies still need to traverse those areas.... Yachts are not important.

I run a nice app called

Wind Alert

This is a link to the web site. It provides almost real time data for wind speed and direction. It also provides wave height and period from buoys located in the ocean. Sure I would like to have more data points but it would seem to me it would not take a govt, more like a simple script, to count the frequency of out of character big waves.

[Nicholson58]

easy search for satellite imaging.

"Monster" Waves Suprisingly Common, Satellites Show

Predicting Rogue Waves | MIT Technology Review

Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites / Observing the Earth / Our Activities / ESA

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/PubServi.../Rosenthal.pdf

mapping
Rogue Wave Software > Products > Visualization > Views Maps > Features

[Spleen]

This thread got me interested in googling, so I googled "rogue wave" + "lake Pontchartrain" and found this, so we apparently aren't the only ones to have experienced something like it on the lake:

Found boaters say they're lucky to be alive | wwltv.com New Orleans

"MANDEVILLE, La. ― A Mandeville restaurant owner and two friends are OK after spending the night in Lake Pontchartrain after their boat capsized.

Clay Prieto, owner of Rips on the Lake, and two men went fishing Sunday afternoon when what Prieto called a rogue wave came upon the boat and turned it over.

“It wasn't very rough at all then all of a sudden this wave came out of the southeast that was just like a tiny tsunami wave and it just threw the whole boat over,” Prieto said.

Prieto said the waves hit at just the right angle to flip his boat. According to the St. Tammany Sheriff's Department the search for the missing boaters began around 11 p.m. Sunday.

“The helicopters kept missing us by little bitty bit because they didn't come close enough inshore,” Prieto said. “We floated all the way from the four mile hump to the Tangipahoa River.”

Prieto and his two friends spent the night drifting with the capsized boat in the lake, which is 62 degrees right now.

Because they were unsure how long they’d survive in the frigid temperatures, Prieto said the night was a cold and scary one.

“It was cold and thank God this morning they spotted us,” Prieto said.

“It's cold water,” said St. Tammny Parish Sheriff’s spokesman Capt. George Bonnett. “That's a long time that they were out there. It's a frightening situation and fortunately, we were able to find them and get them back safely.”

Bonnett said the advantage the three men had was that they told friends and family members where they were going and what time they expected to be home.

When asked if he felt lucky to be alive, Prieto said, “I feel very lucky. I didn't know if we were going to make it.”

The three men were checked out by EMS upon returning to land and are OK."

Doesn't state what size boat it was-- I've seen people out on the lake in questionable conditions in 14 foot boats, etc.


ETA: 18 foot bay boat and they stayed with the boat

Link with more information: http://www.nola.com/northshore/index...scued_aft.html

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

Its a shame there's no way to access such great bodies of information, like, using a computer.

Priceless...

[tomfl]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

SNIP

Its a shame there's no way to access such great bodies of information, like, using a computer.

If its on the internet it must be true.

[snort]

The USS Hornet was hit by a rogue wave back in the day. I'm afraid your stout and sturdy Westsail probably wouldn't look half as good as this after that experience. .....Actually, after reading the internet, it was repeated 60 foot waves that did this damage. Typhoon fun!