12/1/2023 0 Comments Big ocean waves hit shipA small craft - a yacht, say, or a fishing boat - would simply have been crushed by the wave’s crest, which exerted something like one ton of water pressure per square foot (possibly a great deal more, if recent research predicting one-hundred tons of pressure is accurate). If the ship had been shorter, by perhaps as little as fifty feet, it would have slid down the face of the wave, hit the well of the trough at significant speed, and would likely have pitch-poled into a fatal capsize. It climbed from the dynamic chaos of the sea, bore down on the ship, and raced onward. A rogue that arose suddenly from the surrounding swells, as such waves do, and grew to twice the size of its neighbors. It was not a tidal wave, a tsunami created by seismic events, but a storm wave generated by wind, current, and the mathematics of distance. It was 350 metres long (more than a thousand feet), with a potential energy equivalent to about 17,000 kilowatts per metre - more power than the world’s largest hydroelectric dam (the Itaipu dam, on the border of Brazil and Paraguay). This observation enabled subsequent calculations which showed the height of the wave to have been 34 metres (112 feet). He kept his wits, and noted that the ship’s crow’s nest - amidships, ahead of where he was standing - was precisely horizontal to his line of sight. The watch officer looked to the stern - buried in the wave’s crest - and to the bow - plunging and spuming in the trough. The entire length of the Ramapo - almost five-hundred feet - lay steeply along the face of the wave. It caught the ship from behind, lifted its stern toward a towering crest, and plunged the bow into a deep, black trough. The wave seemed to gather the surrounding seas into itself, into a great shadow of turbulent water. And the watch officer on the bridge glimpsed an oncoming wave: vastly larger than the rest, rushing toward them at fifty knots from astern. The sea came alive with reflected light: splashing, roaring, tumbling. In the deep night of February 7 - around 3 am - the clouds parted, and for a moment the clear, glittering moon could be seen from the deck. Every fifteen seconds a new behemoth - large as a five-story office building - shouldered its way into the stern. On the seventh day of the storm, with the east wind howling at sixty knots, the swells grew to an average of fifty feet. The wind had slowly gathered momentum across thousands of nautical miles of the open Pacific, piling up monstrous swells: twenty feet, then thirty, then higher. In February 1933, on its way from San Diego to Manila, the US Navy ship Ramapo was caught in the teeth of a relentless storm.
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