Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [55]
“Perhaps authorities in the past have been radically conservative in the treatment of sea waves. A 60-foot wave as the highest of all time lacks conviction…The theory and law of waves are excellent guides, but, inaccordance with the present custom, if the laws cannot be enforced, they should be repealed.”
By February 9, after about three days of doing nothing but running with the waves, and after a week of being enveloped in the gale, the Ramapo began to make a slow, steady exit from the storm. The storm was tracking a bit more to the north, and Ramapo managed to steam on a more southerly course that would soon take her right past the Cortes Bank and on to San Diego. Meanwhile, the monster swells whipsawed out far ahead of her, spreading out like ripples from a rock thrown on a pond, which dropped in height, but not in depth. The stronger, longer swells passed through the shorter, weaker ones and raced to the east. They would utilize a strange, almost evolutionary logic to self-organize during the next fifteen hundred miles by period, forming sets or trains that held anywhere from five to fifteen waves. A train of such waves is a bizarre exercise in physics. The fastest train—waves with periods that sometimes grow to better than twenty-five seconds—rolls toward shore at around thirty-five miles an hour, yet the individual waves within that train travel at twice that speed. They continually roll from the front of the train to back—like the tread chains on a tank.
After a couple of days, this new swell formed a very well-defined front—a bulge several thousand miles across—and the most powerful waves peppered its leading edge in mile-wide ribbons.
It’s rare that a person sees the leading edge of a deep swell like this. If you’re aboard a ship in calm weather and deep water, you might become aware first of an increase in very long, seemingly slow rollers, followed in an hour or so by the appearance of higher, somewhat steeper waves that seem to stretch across the horizon. This is what James Houtz noticed but failed to identify quickly enough aboard the Jalisco in 1966.
The vast majority of coastal landmasses don’t see these forerunner waves. They run so deep that they scrape across the continental shelf and are refracted or deflected away from land, losing much of their energy in the process. But there are places, like Cortes Bank, where the seafloor transitions rapidly upward from abyssal depths. Forerunners are drawn to such spots like rays of sun through a magnifying glass. They initially stir the water in low half-minute or longer undulations, but as their periods shorten, tremendous breakers can appear almost completely without warning.
It’s interesting to note that, due to simple meteorology, the prime, raw energy of the strongest North Pacific storms—open-ocean swell energy between 50 and even 100 feet—typically doesn’t travel much below the latitudes of Washington and Oregon. Thus, the Ramapo’s giant wave likely dropped to a solid 25 to maybe 35 feet well before it careened headlong onto the Cortes Bank on February 11, 1933. The Bank’s two unique characteristics—that a wave of almost limitless size can break here, and that the Bank, as has been proven, magnifies long period swells into breaking waves between four and five times a swell’s height—means that were the Cortes Bank situated a hundred miles off the coast of Seattle, it might regularly spawn waves at least 200 feet high.
Instead, the Ramapo’s wave probably reached a breaking height somewhere between merely 100 and 150 feet over the Cortes Bank. But like a giant tree falling in a forest, its thunderous fury was released in essentially undocumented privacy. This was understandable. Even if someone had known it was coming, in 1933, no veteran fisherman, no pioneer surfer—no human in his or her right mind—would have set out to confront such a deadly freak of nature.
But nearly six decades