Obviously whoever built Trinity Church on King George Island hadn’t heard the old sailor’s adage, “Below 50 degrees south there is no law; below 60 degrees south there is no God.” This little slice of Russian Orthodoxy is maintained by a priest year-round, and he does such a good job it even has a church-like smell—that unmistakable potpourri of candles, incense, guilt, and shame. That’s an impressive feat given the funk of penguin vomit and seal excrement almost constantly hanging in the air in Antacrtica.
For many, the trek to Antarctica involves sailing from the southern tip of South America and crossing the Drake Passage, a.k.a., “the Drake,” which is known for whipping up some of the roughest seas on the planet. Just for the record: I hate the Drake. Most travellers get to experience the passage from a comfy cruise ship with an icebreaker hull (still not exactly a picnic), but if you’re in a smaller working yacht, as I was, it’s a whole different kettle of krill. In storms, these yachts lurch, roll, and shake so violently that eating is futile given the inevitable seasickness, sleep is nearly impossible, and a simple task like dressing yourself is pure slapstick. Being surrounded by a churning, featureless gray-black monster that has no regard for your life is a sobering experience for a land dweller.
TAMPA - When Harrison Mettling and five of his friends set out for a day of fishing, they never expected to be the ones who were fished out of Tampa Bay.Here's the rest of the story:
"We saw the storm coming in. We thought we could get in in time. And then it was a little rough," said Mettling. "It wasn't that bad, and then a rogue wave came out of nowhere and rolled us over."
Mettling, 24, said the once tranquil bay near Weedon Island became more like high seas, and six foot waves began pummeling the 18-foot boat. The craft's bilge pump seemed to be emptying the water fast enough, until a cord got tangled in the boat's propeller, effectively shutting down the motor.This last comment by Mr. Mettling is clearly a very sound advice based from his own experience.And of course never ever neglect to wear life jacket by any means! Bad weather and freaque waves are to be expected, please make certain don't ever get caught unprepared out there!
The helpless boat, unable to steer or power through the waves, capsized.
"When the boat flipped over, it hit me in the head and I was kind of seeing stars for a little bit," Mettling said. "I couldn't figure out where was up."
Mettling managed to come to his senses, and during the next two hours, swam nearly two miles to shore.
Jared Lyons, 24, and girlfriend Brittany Whitten, 23, recalled the force of the rainfall.
"It hurt," Whitten said. "It felt like needles."
The Lakeland couple said after setting out in the morning, the weather was virtually perfect until late afternoon.
"We got the worst of it. We got turned upside-down," Lyons said.
For Whitten, it was her first time fishing. It might be her last for some time.
"It was terrifying," Whitten said. "But I caught a fish," she said, trying to put humor in a frightening experience.
The Tampa Police marine unit responded to the emergency call. Their boat reached three of the boaters who were struggling in waist deep water. It was too shallow to get them by boat, so officer Randy Lopez got into the bay and reached them in person.
Lyons and Whitten were rescued by a passerby.
"it's a recipe for disaster if you're not prepared out there on the water," Lopez said, noting that none of the boaters was wearing any life jackets.
"This is a prime example that if they had the life jackets on, they could have been safe," Lopez said.
Mettling said he won't make that mistake next time.
"Whenever you see a storm coming in, put on your life jackets and get in as quickly as possible," Mettling recommended. "Don't try to wait and catch that last fish. Go ahead and head home."
A seiche (/ˈseɪʃ/ SAYSH) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.
The term was promoted by the Swiss hydrologist François-Alphonse Forel in 1890, who was the first to make scientific observations of the effect in Lake Geneva, Switzerland.[1] The word originates in a Swiss French dialect word that means "to sway back and forth", which had apparently long been used in the region to describe oscillations in alpine lakes.People in the North America Great Lakes area, especially Lake Erie, generally familiar with seiche motion between Buffalo, New York and Toledo, Ohio after high northeast winds along Lake Erie main axis. It os interest to note Seiche can also be global between Japan and Norway fjord after the 2011 earthquake as reported in this UK Daily Mail article with an interesting long title: "How 2011 Japanese earthquake created freak 5 ft waves that terrified locals on the other side of the world -- in Norway," The report is based on the Live Science article written by Becky Oskin: Norway's Weird Waves Traced to Japan Earthquake. The remarkable research was done by Stein Bondevik, a geologist at Sogn og Fjordane University College in Sogndal, Norway and his team. The findings were published July 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Here's what happened that inspired the study according the the Live science article:
The roiling seas surprised and shocked Norwegians when the waves rolled in after 7 a.m. local time on March 11, said lead study author Stein Bondevik, a geologist at Sogn og Fjordane University College in Sogndal, Norway. The waves measured nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) from trough to crest (their lowest to highest point). No damage was reported, however. "Luckily, they happened at low tide," Bondevik said.
Explanation: It took three worlds to create this simple image. The first world was the Earth, which was quite prominent. The dividing line running horizontally below the middle separates sea from sky. On this part of the Earth, it was almost nighttime. The second world was the Moon, which was almost invisible. The Moon had its unilluminated half masked by the red sunset glow of Earth's sky. A thin sliver of the new Moon was visible, a crescent that traces the bright curving line. The third world was the Sun, which does not appear directly. All of the light recorded in the image originated from the Sun. The above half-second exposure was taken last week from Anping, Taiwan. A few minutes after this image was taken the Earth had spun just a little bit further -- forcing theMoon to follow the Sun into the sea -- and the horizon to become dark.
On November 21st, 2012, Matthew Hartman attempted to pull off an epic marriage proposal that his girlfriend would talk about for the rest of their lives. He led her to a large rock surrounded by ocean waters at Laguna Beach, California, and then sang her a song that he wrote for the occasion. Then he got down on one knee to pop the question. Or, at least that was the plan.
A large ocean wave had other plans for the couple. At just the wrong time, it decided to crash the party and sweep the girl off her feet before Hartman could. . . .
On the day of the event, I arrived just as his friends were laying down a path of candles out to the rock that Matt was planning to stand on. That idea was quickly swept away as an enormous wave engulfed both the candles and the friend who was laying them down. Having witnessed that scene, everyone began to panic and we almost decided to have the proposal on the beach instead of out on the rocks. I tried my best to reassure everybody, telling them, “What are the chances of it happening during the actual proposal?”
However, I was secretly hoping that the odds would be on my side and that they would get swallowed by a wave. After all, that was the shot I had dreamed about. Little did I know that I would get my chance right as the ring makes its first appearance. Looking back, it probably was not the wisest thing to put the two in potential danger, and thankfully nobody was hurt.The last comment "nobody was hurt" is certainly the best and thankful part of the whole story. No one can guarantee this but they just happened. Hwang's concluding comment tells it all:
In the end, it might not have been the most thought out proposal, nor was it safe by any means, but the results from that day turned out to be both spectacular and breathtaking–literally!So that's the way it was happened -- a nice story book like story. Hope their future life together will be just as happy and successful as this drama of making very special memorable marriage proposal turned out to be!
The rogue waves were coming.
Ten feet. Twelve feet. Higher.
It was all over the news. The rogue waves could soon be pounding into Chicago like a posse of bandits, a band of terrorists, the horsemen of the apocalypse.
An alert had been issued from 9 a.m. Tuesday through Wednesday morning.
Stay off the breakwalls. Stay out of the water.
Right.
The surest way to get Chicago people to the lakeshore, short of cheap beer and fireworks, is to promise them something as exciting as rogue waves, which is why I grabbed a sun hat Tuesday afternoon and headed to the beach.
Before I went, I did what any modern person does in anticipation of disaster. I consulted Google.
What exactly was a rogue wave anyway?
I'd seen big waves in Chicago. A few summers back, as I was biking, a huge swell of water crashed into the lakefront and a towering spray swept me off my bike and almost swallowed the bike whole.
But rogue waves? They sounded especially ominous.
"Rogue, freak, or killer waves have been part of marine folklore for centuries," said the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "but have only been accepted as a real phenomenon by scientists over the past few decades."
Rogue waves, other sites reported, are also known as extreme waves, abnormal waves and monster waves.
Armed with that vast vocabulary, I went in search of terror.
The 31st Street beach on Chicago's South Side is one of the city's prettiest. The bike path is wide and smooth. The skyline rises in the near distance. In summer, the prairie grasses and wildflowers shimmer while the masts of white boats clang in the harbor. Most uplifting of all, parking is just a dollar an hour.
I cared about none of this. All I wanted were rogue waves.
There were, in fact, some waves, more than usual in the windy day, little white-topped swells that the kids splashed in.
But rogue? These waves were about as roguish as Justin Bieber.
While I waited for the rogue waves to arrive, I called Chicago's climate master for further enlightenment.
"I hope you haven't been misled into thinking you're going to see one," WGN's Tom Skilling said. "I'm a little surprised as much has been made of this as has."
He suspected that the description "rogue waves" was intended to push bikers, joggers and curiosity seekers off the shoreline and away from some dangerous big waves, though not necessarily rogue ones.
The rogue wave, he explained, isn't just a giant wave. It's a wave that is far bigger than all the waves around it.
Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, if I understood correctly.
"The rogue wave is a freak," he said. "It's often the marriage, the intersection, of two waves that slam into each other. Rogue waves also form where you've got a wave intersecting a current flowing opposite it."
Such a wave, he went on, can happen in oceans or in lakes. There's a theory that a rogue wave caused the legendary 1975 sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior.
Rogue or not, the waves were definitely building in Lake Michigan on Tuesday, and Skilling noted that the winds — which result in waves — were also building, in a way unusual for July.
Dramatic weather, he explained, is often caused by the clash of cold Arctic air and the warmer air in the lower 48. But in summer, when Arctic regions warm up, such clashes of air are rare.
"This is not the time of year when you get highly organized winds," he said.
(I had a vision of highly organized winds arranging their spice drawers alphabetically. Or color-coding their perfectly folded underwear. But back to rogue waves.)
"It is interesting that we, even for a brief period, have winds that are as well-organized as they will be later today and into tonight," he said.
So, who knew? A rogue wave might turn up.
"If you see one," he said, "let me know!"
In the late afternoon, I drove north to the Foster Avenue beach, still chasing rogue waves. The waves were bigger there, verging on wild, though none of them was freakishly tall and alone.
Daredevils continued to bike and jog at the water's edge, but many people just stood and watched, struck still by the force and the mystery of the wind on the water.
Whatever you call it.I am not quite certain if Ms. Schmich was disappointed that she did not really seen a real freaque wave, or she was just a little sarcastic, or may be a little bit of both. Since she has already recognized that freaque wave can be "sounded especially ominous" and she did experienced first hand of being "swept off" her bike on the lakefront, I hope she's content with her experience and not really expect to see anything worse when she "went in search of terror". Even though she sounded the alarm: "The rogue waves were coming" and they did not come. That's really something good for us to just be happy, not worry!
The Bering Sea can be a dangerous place, and for those who make a living fishing for crab, the threat of death looms large, particularly in stormy conditions. One occupational hazard isrogue waves . They hit without warning and so fast deckhands have no time to prepare.
Such was the case aboard the Saga while crab fishing at night. The scary incident was captured during filming of last Tuesday’s episode of Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch.” A 50-foot rogue wave washed over the bow, covering the deck and sending one crab pot overboard, nearly taking a deckhand with it.
Captain Elliott Neese watched in horror from the safety of the bridge.
“Yeah, is everybody on the boat still,” Neese said over the loudspeaker in a panicked voice as he scanned the deck, searching out his deckhands. “Is everybody still there?”
Someone answered, “Is everybody all right? Uh, yeah.”
Deckhand Kevin Vanderpol was preparing one of the pots when the wave hit.
“I felt as if I was going into the pot,” he said. “I just threw my hands underneath thelauncher . The pot slid out.”
What would have happened had the wave pushed him into the pot? Engineer Mike Vanderveldt said such an outcome would have meant instant death.
“If you’re in the pot and the pot goes overboard, you’re going to the bottom with it,” he said.
Once everybody was accounted for, Neese let out a sigh with a whistle and one word, “Wow.”
Now you know why they call it “Deadliest Catch.” This was definitely a close call, one that had Vanderveldt thinking about his occupation.
“This is going to make me hate crab fishing,” he said.So this tells what was happening when a freaque wave hit. But it does not help us understand what's happened with freaque wave any better! It just happened -- A 50-foot rogue wave washed over the bow, covering the deck and sending one crab pot overboard, nearly taking a deckhand with it. It IS frightening! But for the people on board, it's just another day at work on "Deadliest Catch."
Cleveland, June 1 -- Scientists and weather observers agreed today that a sudden shift in wind was the probable cause of the giant wave which swept the Lake Erie shore line east and west of Cleveland early yesterday drawning at least seven persons and injuribng several more.So the happening in Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio was on May 31, 1942 -- a case no one seemed to have remembered that it had happened. When the famous Lake Michigan squal line case near Chicago happened in Junem26, 1954 with 8 fishermen drawned, there's clearly resembles to the Lake Erie case dozen years earlier, but no one ever made the connection. They should all be the new topic of meteotsunami study. But this one is a forgotten case! Thanks to Google Search that by chance brought it to my attention. (Understandably 1942 was in the early stage of WWII, people clearly were less inclined to pay attention to some Lake Erie shore happenings, even with 7 lost souls.) This was not the first case or another similiar meteotsunami case. This one does provided some important information not alluded in other cases -- the sound effect!
One fisherman described the wave as an enormous black wall that blotted out everything and rushed in with a deep rolling rumble. The only warning he said was a shrieking noise like a siren which preceeded the wave. (Emphasize added.)I think not all similar cases will have this sound effect clearly noticed as this one here by the very observant fisherman in 1942. But by all means sound effect shoud be also an element to be considered in the Freaque wave/Meteotsunami research!
Searchers said on Thursday they have grave concerns for seven people aboard an American schooner that has been missing for three weeks between New Zealand and Australia.
Maritime New Zealand said on Thursday that searches by plane this week found no sign of the 70-foot (21-metre) wooden vessel named Nina, which was built in 1928.
Authorities say there are three American women and three American men aged between 17 and 73 on board. Also aboard is a British man, aged 35.
The boat left the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand on May 29. Authorities say the last communication was on June 4, when the Nina was about 370 nautical miles west of New Zealand.
Steve Rendle, a spokesman for the Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand, said authorities were first alerted to a potential problem on June 14, when they were contacted by concerned family members of the crew.
A storm that day saw winds gusting up to 110 kilometres (68 miles) per hour and waves of up to 8 metres (26 feet).
“Quite often when yachts are sailing around, they have their own arrangements when it comes to keeping in contact,” he said.
He said the boat had an emergency locator beacon aboard but it had not been activated.
Rendle said authorities began a communications search on June 14, which involved attempting to contact the boat through various radio frequencies as well as contacting other boats in the same area.
He said a New Zealand Air Force plane on Tuesday conducted a search around the area where the boat went missing. A second search by the plane on Wednesday went as far as the Australian coast but again turned up nothing.
He said he didn’t have an exact timetable for the boat’s trip, but that authorities would have expected it to have arrived in Australia by this week.
Cohen said the tide going out through the inlet suddenly became stronger about 3:30 p.m., carrying divers over a submerged breakwater and eventually exposing rocks in the structure that are normally 3to 4 feet underwater.
The strong current out to sea continued for one or two minutes, and Cohen backed his boat away from the breakwater to avoid being pulled over it, according to the tsunami warning center.
Cohen then noticed a large wave 6 feet tall from trough to peak spanning the mouth of the inlet. The current reversed direction, causing a surge of sea water into the inlet that washed divers back over the breakwater.
ASBURY PARK, N.J. -- It appears that a rare type of tsunami called a "meteotsunami" hit the New Jersey coast June 13, with Barnegat Light bearing the brunt of the wave.
"There was a strong weather system that moved from across the eastern U.S. that day, then moved offshore New Jersey," said Paul Whitmore, director of the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.
Strong weather systems can cause jumps in air pressure, spawning waves that act just like tsunamis, Whitmore said.
"The impacts were greatest there in Barnegat Light," he said. An approximately 6-foot wave knocked three people off the inlet jetty, injuring at least two of them, according to a center report.So there you have it: a happening of meteotsunmai in New Jersey shore!
A hero fisherman has saved the life of his injured mate after an epic three-hour swim through freezing waters off the Gold Coast.
A freak wave struck the men's dinghy as they returned from a fishing trip late on Tuesday afternoon, leaving one of them with two dislocated shoulders and a dislocated hip.
They had just enough time to grab their lifejackets before the boat went under.
In a heroic act of endurance, the injured man's mate hauled him across two kilometres of freezing open ocean, battling strong currents and big waves.
Three hours later the pair came to ashore on South Stradbroke Island, but were still in danger as they hadn't set off their distress beacon and had no shelter as temperatures plunged into the single digits.
The men were able to gather branches, which they used to make a crude shelter while they awaited rescue.
Relatives of the men contacted police on Tuesday night when the men failed to return from the trip and the search area was narrowed, based on where the men usually fished.
At one point, the freezing men could see a search helicopter on a beach on the island, but they weren't able to signal the crew.
Sergeant Tony Nelson said the pair knew the chopper would be back and resigned themselves to wait in the cold.
"Once the boat capsized, they were able to adapt quite quickly," he told reporters.
"They were always confident that they would make it to the shore. I think they were fortunate."
The men are both in a stable condition in hospital.
The man who towed his mate to shore is being treated for hypothermia.And this man is most certainly the hero! The Seven News article has an appropriate headline: "Hero fisherman saves mate in epic swim."
