[Paddlewise] Rogue Waves

I've been sitting here this morning thinking over how many years I've spent
at sea..... not just as a "mariner" but actually "at sea" and it amounts to
a fair number of years. Between running a salmon troller, working on the
Hughes Glomar Explorer (my first job on a "ship"), working for several
drilling ship outfits (28 days on and 28 days off for 7 years), and finally
on tankers for Sun, Exxon and Chevron it amounts to about a full decade
actually at sea. I'm not counting the 5 years we spent cruising the sailboat
because even though we always slept on the boat, we were at anchor 90% of
the time so maybe another six months underway time.

I know that compared to the "real sailors" back in the days when sailors
would spend 40 years of their lives at sea it's not that much but hey, times
have changed.

A fair bit of this has been in nasty places. The Davis Strait off the west
coast of Greenland, offshore of Newfoundland (where the Ocean Ranger went
down shortly after I left the area), the west coast of Ireland (nastiest
summer I've ever spent... not counting San Francisco), numerous trips from
Houston, TX through the Panama Canal to Valdez, AK and return, and a regular
route from SFO to Valdez to Anchorage to Kenai to Honolulu to SFO. Plus two
memorable trips across the north Atlantic in a semi-submersible drill rig.

And in all that time I've never seen a "rogue wave". Mind you, I've seen
some big seas (70-foot as measure by a wave-rider buoy on that semi) but no
actual rogue waves. I'm thinking about this because of a tv program which
alleges that there are lots more rogue waves than we have thought. That's
not too surprising because up until recently lots of people thought "rogue
waves" were the sorts of things incompetent captains made up to explain the
screw ups that sank their ships.

We're not talking about boomers on the coast where a submerged rock might
be. Nor is a rogue wave any type of tsunami; a tsunami in the open ocean is
so deep that the wave itself may not even be noticed. A "rogue wave" has to
be a wave in the open ocean that is so out of character with the prevailing
sea by its height that it's unexplainable. Normally they occur alone and
suddenly and, if the stories are to be believed, can reach heights of over
100 feet with 50 to 60 foot not unusual (well... unusual for a "rogue wave"
at least). One of the photos on the tv program showed the bow of a ship
headed into a sea dotted with whitecaps with a huge wave breaking along the
starboard side of the ship at a 45-degree angle.

So... my question is... anyone ever encounter a rogue wave and what were the
circumstances. Anyone have any thoughts?


Craig Jungers
Moses Lake, WA
www.nwkayaking.net
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