by Chris Dixon
And they kept growing.
The jet stream pushed the Siberian front as far as the International Dateline a few days later. There it began to interact with one storm centered just above Hawaii and another near Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The dense air of the frigid high pulled a vast plume of sultry, low-pressure air from a dying tropical depression far into the North Pacific. The winds around the high funneled into the lows, fueling a precipitous drop in barometric pressure, a condition meteorologists call “explosive cyclogenesis,” or just as often “a bomb.” That bomb detonated above the Ramapo on the morning of February 6. Winds went from whining to screaming through her rigging, and the sea surface became streaked and marbled with wind-driven foam and spray. “The elements began to give evidence that something out of the ordinary was about to happen,” Whitemarsh noted dryly when writing about it later.
In the space of a few hours, the waves rapidly grew from simply large to mountainous juggernauts fifty feet high, a quarter mile wide, reaching twelve hundred feet deep under the surface. Their forward speed was, somehow, actually slightly faster than that of the sixty-mile-an-hour wind.
When the lows consolidated into a single monster system, Ramapo’s barometer plummeted to 28.40—a record for a North Pacific winter storm— and sustained winds reached 70 miles per hour. Since hurricanes can have sustained winds of 150 miles per hour, this might not sound very dire. However, a hurricane’s core wind field is usually no more than a hundred miles across, while winds over 110 miles per hour actually blow the tops off waves and thus, in effect, reduce their height and power. This cyclone was at least as wide as North America, and the hurricane-force winds spanned half of the North Pacific. In the deep troughs of swells, the air was eerily calm, but when Ramapo was born to the crests every minute or so, she was assaulted by the gale. Apocalyptic squalls occasionally gave way to moonlit skies and awestruck viewing.
To survive, the Ramapo had to maintain the same direction as the swells, keeping the waves at her stern and running like hell. Yet compared to waves moving at six times her top speed, she was almost standing still. “The vessel was dwarfed in comparison to the seas,” Whitemarsh wrote. “It would have been disastrous to have steamed on any other course.”
As the seas grew, the Ramapo’s single screw propeller would lift clear of the water each time it crested a swell, causing the engines to rev dangerously, and Captain Mayo was forced to reduce power. This was perilous. Were the ship not being driven forward with sufficient force, she might wallow sideways across the westerly winds and waves. Had this happened, she would have been driven nose-first into the seething Pacific and disappeared within moments. Instead, she was quite literally surfing for her life on the downslope of each passing swell.
James Whitemarsh recalled, “He told me they were simply running from the waves. In all his years at sea, he never saw anything like them again.”
Serendipitously, the Ramapo turned out to be the perfect size and dimension to survive. She was 478 feet long—two Boeing 747s placed nose to nose—and this length fit snugly between the waves. Were she, say, 880 feet, the length of the Titanic or a modern-day container ship, the situation might have been terminal. Atop the crest of a 1,200-foot-long wave, her bow and stern would have lost buoyancy and drooped down—a condition called hogging. Fifteen seconds later, the situation would have reversed, with bow and stern supported, but her amidships bearing tremendous weight—a condition called sagging. These forces can easily result in a catastrophic set of side to side rolls; if they don’t, they can essentially snap a ship in two.
Instead, as Whitemarsh later noted, the conditions actually made for ideal observation. Swell and wind approached from exactly the same angle. Ramapo was thus not faced with the specter of wind-driven waves approaching from sideways angles—a nightmarish condition that can cause waves to ramp up into treacherous peaks. She was steaming across a vast, undulating ribbon of seemingly impossible energy.
For the most part, Whitemarsh leaves us to wonder what he and his ninety crewmen thought and did while they endured conditions straight from a Jules Verne novel. Surely, he and Captain Mayo would have filled the Ramapo’s ballast tanks, so she would ride low and stable in the water; general quarters would have been sounded, with a contingent of men ready to cut loose the lifeboats without a moment’s hesitation (as if there was a hope in hell in a lifeboat). And yet beyond maintaining the ship’s speed and position and their readiness to evacuate, they were mostly along for the ride, free to gape and wonder and pray. Over and over, hour after hour, the ship struggled up one hill and into the teeth of an unspeakable gale, and then, every fifteen seconds, she slid down the next into a dead calm, shouldered between racing mountains.
As earlier scientists theorized, there comes a moment during the evolution of a storm when gravity asserts its dominance over a swell. It is simply carrying so much water that its weight prevents it from growing any higher. At this point, the sea state is said to be fully developed. In modern theory (that is, what is generally accepted today), the maximum height for a fully developed, single open-ocean swell is 78 feet high with a period of twenty-three seconds and a velocity of seventy-seven miles an hour. This occurs after a seventy-knot wind has been pushing on the swell for a thousand or so miles.
However, the Ramapo was in just this situation, and it would soon record a single rogue wave nearly 50 percent higher still. How can this be?
Simply put, this tidy calculation of potential wave height is insufficient to account for the almost incomprehensibly complex physics of wave generation, and science has come to accept that what appears to be a single wave is, in some cases, anything but. So while open-ocean waves should fit this formula, exceptions occur all the time and for a whole host of reasons. Not only do waves interact with the swirling atmosphere and respond rapidly to changes in wind speed, but because waves of different periods run at different speeds, they regularly run through and over their brethren. One wave might cancel out or highly amplify the energy of another, a process scientists call nonlinear transfer. A 30-foot, 10-second wave 100 feet deep might be overtaken by a 60-foot marauder 20 seconds long and 1,200 feet deep; this might result for a short time in a single 90-footer we call a “rogue wave.” Or a line of big swells might crash headlong into a strong ocean current like the Gulf Stream—and stack up like a chain-reaction crash on a freeway into a series of steep, deadly peaks. The result is a temporary but highly unstable wave, actually a trio of rogues, that mariners call “The Three Sisters.” These climb far higher—perhaps even two to three times higher than the surrounding swells—and their troughs can seem so fathomless that they have been called “holes in the ocean.” When one wave runs over the top of another, it can actually rise up and shoal across the slower wave’s back, producing a gigantic breaker that, like the Cortes Bank, appears in the empty open ocean. These waves are not uncommon at all. A famous 2001 European Union study called “Max Wave” used a network of global satellites to determine that, at any single point in time, there are probably eight or nine such rogue waves—either in single or “three sisters” form—coursing through the world’s oceans.
In his article, Whitemarsh describes several similar encounters then known to mariners of his day. In 1837, Jules Dumont d’Urville claimed to have seen a 100-foot wave while sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1861, a 100-foot-high lighthouse off England’s Isles of Scilly was struck by a wave that tore off the bell in her tower. The Tillamook Light in Oregon had seen days when waves blasted rocks through windows 133 feet high.
Even Christopher Columbus told of giant, seemingly impossible waves during his third trip to the New World in 1498. Columbus was leading a fleet of six ships through a stormy, narrow passage at the southern tip of Trinidad. He heard “a fearsome roaring” and turned to see a wave higher than his over-60-foot masts bearing down on the flotilla. It lifted all the ships higher than anything the admiral had ever seen and then dropped them into a frightening trough, burying them with foam
and spray. He named the passageway “The Mouth of the Serpent.”
The passengers aboard the Annie Jane were not so lucky. On September 28, 1853, the steamer left Liverpool for Canada carrying more than five hundred emigrants to a new life in America. But as Annie Jane was passing the Hebrides islands in the dead of the night, she was struck by a frigid, black wall of water that came out of nowhere, collapsing her poop deck and instantly crushing two hundred people.
In May of the same year, the fifty-two-foot yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton, England, for Sydney, Australia. But off Africa, a hurricane-force gale pushed great northerly swells headlong against the south-flowing Agulhas current, which sweeps past the Cape of Good Hope. Amid a pileup of swells, the struggling Mignonette finally succumbed to a single, colossal peak again higher than her masts. Nineteen days later, starving and adrift aboard a leaky dinghy, the desperate captain and two crewmen decapitated and devoured their dying seventeen-year-old cabin boy. The trio was miraculously rescued four days later and carried back to England to be tried for murder and cannibalism. Following one of the most macabre court cases in maritime history, one man was acquitted while two spent a mere six months in prison. But the sensational case forever outlawed a gruesome, if occasionally necessary, “Custom of the Sea.”
Whitemarsh doesn’t give heights of the waves that regularly swept beneath the ship but instead noted that they typically moved at sixty to sixty-six knots. “Probably no two seas [waves] were identical in length and height,” he wrote. “They varied from 500 to 750 feet in length of sides, or total wave length of 1,000 to 1,500 feet, as measured by the ship itself and the seaman’s eye. This is verified by motion picture film taken during the morning watch. The Ramapo is 477 feet ten inches in length. For purposes of illustration, a conservative wave length of 1,180 feet is assumed. It was noted that the ship’s entire length glided down the lee slope of waves an appreciable time before the next crest overtook the stern.” [Unfortunately, the film footage Whitemarsh refers to seems to have disappeared into a black hole at the U.S. Naval or National Archives.]
After twenty-four hours of racing up and down over behemoth waves, Whitemarsh posted Lieutenant Frederick C. Marggraff to watch and measure the swells from an ideal spot atop the pilot’s house. At around 3:30 A.M. , Marggraff stood dumbfounded as a billowy monolith eclipsed the moon. A great wave had collected what seemed the entire ocean in its maw. It stacked up behind Ramapo, nearly a quarter mile long from its trough to its crest, and moved much faster than the other swells. As it overtook the ship, the Ramapo began to slide forward like a surfboard descending a wave. Whitemarsh and the crew held on as Ramapo pitched forward a harrowing twenty-four degrees. Fortunately, the great swell was not breaking in a top-to-bottom fashion; it was simply so large that a portion of its upper reaches submerged the ship’s stern and cascaded down her deck. Had the swell in fact been breaking over the backs of its fellow waves, Ramapo would have been completely buried and almost certainly sunk. Instead, she rocketed forward as if atop a sea of ball bearings. In the canyonlike trough, her bow dug in but not so deep that she was pitchpoled forward. Despite the tumult, Lieutenant Marggraff somehow kept his nerve. The five-foot-eleven officer set a line of sight between the pilot’s house and the crow’s nest. Using basic trigonometry, he calculated a true wave height of 112 feet, or 34 meters—that is, a wave roughly ten stories high. This remains the largest wave ever observed by a human being from the deck of a ship, and the first reliable documentation of a wave greater than 100 feet high.
Since that time, there have been numerous terrifying and reliable measurements of waves approaching, but none officially “besting,” the Ramapo wave’s height when measured from an actual sea-level position. In 1995, the North Sea oil platform Draupner had a mammoth rogue wave 95 feet high sweep beneath her from seas that were averaging only around 30 feet. Nine months and
eleven days later, Captain Ronald Warwick was captaining the Queen Elizabeth II through 40-foot seas off the coast of Newfoundland around the periphery of Hurricane Luis. At 4:10 A.M. , a Canadian NOMAD buoy nearby bobbed over a wave 98 feet high. Moments later, Warwick gasped. An eerie line of white phosphorescence loomed across the horizon directly ahead. It appeared, he famously wrote, “that the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover.”
The ship plowed into a wave that smashed seventy feet above her waterline. She then careened downward into a breathtaking drop on the wave’s backside before facing an even more nightmarish peak. This wave exploded through thick windows of her main lounge, two levels above her eighty-foot-high main deck. Had the ship been sidelong to these waves, she would have surely rolled right over.
The biggest weather-driven wave ever measured seems to have been generated during a disastrous gale whose 70- to 80-foot waves sank five sailboats competing in 1998’s Sydney to Hobart race. An Australian helicopter went in to rescue the crewman of the stricken vessel Kingurra. As the bird hovered in position near the boat, pilot Darryl Jones saw a massive wall of water bearing down and made an emergency ascent to 150 feet. When the wave passed beneath him, his precise radio altimeter measured a mere ten feet of elevation. The wave was 140 feet high.
Miraculously, Ramapo was drawn backward up the face of her mammoth wave and eventually over its crest and down its backside. The wave passed on, heading directly for the Cortes Bank, carrying an almost incomprehensible amount of energy in its belly, the equivalent of 29.6 billion watts. As a comparison, on a hot summer’s day, the entire city of New York consumes only about 11 billion watts.
Ross Palmer Whitemarsh survived another forty-four years. On December 7, 1941, he was in charge of a minesweeping division. From the deck, of the USS Gamble, he watched bombs drop around and narrowly miss Ramapo as she lay exposed in Pearl Harbor. For all his life, he swore that one of the boats under his command sunk a torpedo-laden miniature Japanese submarine in the hours before the attack. Such a damning revelation would cast a harsh glare on American commanders who claimed the attack was a complete surprise. “But the Pentagon and whoever wouldn’t believe him because he had no proof,” said his daughter, “Taffy” Wells. “Then a few years ago, they found the sub.”
Whitemarsh went on to lead mine-clearing operations in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, while facing intense artillery barrages and a kamikaze attack that nearly sunk his ship. His service earned two Legions of Merit and a slew of other citations.
Not long before Whitemarsh died in 1977, his grandnephew James visited him one last time. Ross Palmer was still mowing his own yard. James said, “He was a cool customer. He never once conveyed to me that he feared for his life.”
I asked Ms. Wells if her dad ever said he was frightened during his time aboard Ramapo, or later during the war. “Dad went over huge waves,” Ms. Wells said, “had ships blown out from beneath him. But no, he wasn’t scared. My dad was never scared of anything.”
The descriptions of Whitemarsh by his relatives parallels something I would come to recognize in people from Flippy Hoffman, Jim Houtz, and Harrison Ealey to the big wave surfers facing ten-story rogues atop the Cortes Bank today. In short, even if they do feel fear, they are somehow able to overcome it—to become almost analytical in the face of life-threatening conditions that would leave most of us paralyzed.
At the end of “Great Sea Waves,” Whitemarsh wrote: “Since time immemorial, seafaring men have been telling the world in their inarticulate way that storm waves attain heights which seem incredible to the rest of mankind. The privilege of viewing great storm waves of extreme height is a rare one indeed. Furthermore, we have no assurance that the highest waves of the ocean have been observed or measured. If such a wave should ever be encountered, it is probable that all hands would be chiefly concerned with the safety of the ship to the exclusion of any scientific measurement of the phenomenon.
“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.