30m freak wave/anyone seen one? useless topic really!

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benlui

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I cant help but worry when making an offshore passage about freak waves. I really love watching and reading things about freak waves, or even just very large waves of 15m or more. but sometimes i cant stop worrying about it when off watch. Sad i know. But, has anyone here actually seen a freak wave like this? The Pont Aven (Brittany ferries) was hit by a 12m freak wave which caused some damage and injury in 2006. But has anyone here ever been unlucky enough to see such waves of over 15m? I hear the boys on the rigs have all the stories!!!
 
Winter 2005 we were out in the North sea, wind gusting to 90 kts according to our annemometer and we took a big one over the bow ( I work on a large platform supply vessel). Not sure what height it was as I was in my cabin holding on to the day bed, but it was enough to pitch me onto the deck. Got called to the bridge as the nav light alarm on the foremast lights and Port side lights were sounding. Could'nt reset them. Following morning when I went to the bridge to check things out we found that both nav lights and the fast reccue craft had been carried away. All the windscreen wiper arms on the bridge windows were mangled. Since the bridge windows are at least 13 mtrs above waterline and the formast light is about 2 mtrs higher, the wave that hit us must have been at least 15mtrs and probably more. It was a wild night.
 
I've also seen 12+m waves in the North Sea, scary stuff! The only consolation is that you won't be leaving the coast of Cork in the kind of weather that produces these waves!

Places like South Africa on the other hand can be very different, massive swell and very little wind.
 
I emigrated with my family to Canada when I was 14 on a Polish liner called the Stefan Batory. We left beginning of November and we were in a F9 3 days out from Tilbury. That was pretty wild and my Dad and I reckoned the bow and stern were going up and down about 40-50ft when we went out to look the next day. It made playing table tennis on the deck quite entertaining.

On the wall of the ship's photographers shop was an innocuous framed photo which took a bit of time to understand. I asked the photographer what it was and he explained it was a wave that had hit the ship port-side on the previous year at about the same time. He took a photo of it from the lifeboat deck just as he fled inside. The wave in the photo looked like a solid wall of water at least 20-30 ft higher than where he was standing, which was probably 50-60ft above the waterline. I have never doubted the existence of so-called freak waves since that moment. He told me, by the way, that it hit the ship and rolled her over a very long way and took out portholes all down the port side, causing a lot of damage. She was about 19000 tons and stabilised. Tough little ship though - there's a website to her here. Very sad to see that last photo of her being broken up in 2000.
 
Morst of the waves here are the run of the mill storm conditions...Freak waves in the North Sea are those of around 30 metres.

They occur usually about once a year and on one rig I was involved with one of those waves actually lifted the BOP and its carrier of the tracks and derailed it...the BOP weighed 240 tonnes. and was sitting about 100ft above sea level.

There is a picture on the web taken from a supply boat of a Sedco rig experiencing a similar wave.. It looks insignificant untill you realise from the scale of the rig that it is 100ft high!!!!

Heavy Seas
 
I sat in the Obsevation Lounge on the Pont Aven during a really bad storm with the Guitarist from the band Journey, the waves were going over the glass roof in the upper bar that night and the ship was earily empty due to so many passengers being in their cabins ill. We sat there all night on this roller coaster ride that was just awesome . On a later trip during a similar storm those very same windows in that observation lounge were smashed.
 
No direct experience luckily, but definitely there are more than stories about this topic.
Three casualties and many more injuried in this case, for instance.
Further details and pics here, if you're interested.
Michelangelo-incidente_danni_frontale1(CSuttora)(150)rs.JPG
 
Yep!! Nortsea, been there done that!! Still out here. I was on a semi submersible rig, pentagon 84, one night the wqaves were breaking over the winch towers, they are 100 feet from te sea level, allowing for trougs etc, the waves must ave been at least 80 feet and not just one of them!! There was a bunch, severely bad night!!
 
In the 1950's I was on a 500ft cargo vessel in the North Atlantic in hurricane Carol. The auxiliary wheel and compass on the poop were swept away and the stongbacks in the lifeboats which were probably 30ft -40ft above the waterline were broken. I recall being on the bridge which was another deck up looking up at the crests of the seas.
 
Is there any comfort in the hope that a sailing boat may act more like a corked bottle?

Any ship with mass will resist the movement of the water due to interia. Perhaps little tiddlers (by comparison) like ours, will ride better?

Or should we all give up now? /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif
 
Firstly my oceanography lecturere at Dartmouth always taught there was no such thing as a freak wave, waves being controlled y the laws of physics always acted as predicted if you understood the process. On a very basic rule every 7th wave is bigger than the other 6, as is every 7th 7th wave and so on. There are of course many complication factors such as the nature of the disturbance causing the waves, the fetch, the shape of the area of sea, you get different results from the same stimulation in the North Sea as you do in the Atlantic, and so on.

I have not knowingly experienced a 30M wave but standing on the bridge of a submarine with a heigth of eye of almost 40 ft above sea level I have had waves break over me (I was strapped in with a pretty substantial safet line) I have also seen depth guage changes of 60ft whilst riding out a storm at 300 ft in the Atlantic.

Those big waves are very very powerful
 
Spent 3 years in the North Sea around oil rigs and platforms. We had a Wave rider buoy in the field that sent us continuous wave height data to a graph recorder. Biggest wave we recorded was 24 meters. Rigs are built to withstand the so called 100 year wave, supposdly 30 meters high once in a hundred years. I think they underestimated its height and frequency.
 
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