Yachts vs. Rogue Waves...

on cruisetalk, there has been much debate about that particular picture. Some memebers say it was photoshopped, while some say it was real so i really dont know. To me it could be both.

video of Freak wave

I have a video of a cruise ship hitting a freak/large wave, originall from the German TV show Spiegle. The video was posted on the website Grosse seefahrt, but you need to log in to see it, and its in German. The ship is one of the mini cruise ships build by Blohm and Voss and it wa sin the mediterrnian, amazingly scary as there is a camera in the bridge and you see the wave comming up then breaking over the bow then smashing throgh the bridge windows.

Obviously you are talking about the former speed twins that were from Royal Olympic Cruises. They were known as Olympia Voyager and Olympia Explorer...They are very fast vessels...having a max speed upwards of 32 knots...and that is very fast for a ship weighing 25000 tonnes. About two years ago they both were struck by freak waves and suffered similar damage, thats is, smashing the bridge windows. This all happned after they belonged to R.O.C.

Saw something about this the other night on the History Channel. It was a show about rogue waves and was very interesting.

The History Channel is cashing in on the Poseidon movie I guess.

Here's another great wave pic... not a cruise ship this time though.

Yes, they had a lot of footage from the movie.

i remembered this! that was quite frightening just seeing that! I never saw a wave attacking a ship so high!

A British research team has observed some of the biggest sea swells ever measured. A whole series of giant waves hammered into their ship that were so big, according to computer models used to set safety standards for ships and oil rigs, they shouldn't even exist...

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,408953,00.html

THIS... is why we use Dockwise!

Back to the topic of Rogue Waves, "Oceanography and Seamanship" by Van Dorn has an excellent discussion on constructive interference in a wave system. There are nomographs showing how for a given wind speed and fetch there will be waves of a given mean height with anomalous waves reaching 4 times to 8 times mean heights due to interference. I seem to recall that every 10,000 waves there will be one several times the mean height with many that are twice the mean.
Everyone who has been to sea knows that when the NOAA reports 8 to 10 footers you can count on getting hit by a few 15 footers even in a fairly short passage.

Van Dorn also has photos and reports from US Navy tank testing that show a vessel should survive an encounter with a breaking wave as long as the wave height is less than the dimension of the vessel's exposure to the wave...ie a 100 foot vessel going head into a 30 foot wave should survive. The same 100 foot vessel presenting her 22 foot beam to the 30 foot wave will have a good probability of capsize. And of course we all know that most motor yachts are NOT self righting!

Dave

Good post Dave! Speaking of wave frequencies and anomolies, "Davewb" sent the link below. He uploaded the Perfect Wave video to a hosting site. It's clearly a free hosting site based on the girls decorating the perimeter... all wanting your monitary attention.

If you think the bridge of a cruise ship is a fairly safe place to be, you're about to get wet...

http://www.yourfilehost.com/media.php?cat=video&file=DiePerfekteWelle.wmv

Wow! Can you believe the luck... every single one of those hot ladies lives right around my house!

Impressive vid though... just WOW! Can you imagine just standing there seeing that immense wall of water coming at you? Three words.... "brace for impact"!

I uploaded the "roque-wave breaking through the glass of the bridge-video", but only after seeing it for the 5th time I noticed something strange: The vessel that has so much green water slamming into the bridge is probably NOT the same ship as the blue-hulled cruise ship you see earlier in the video. The bridge that is flooded seems to be located much lower than the bridge of the cruise ship. It's scary enough to look at, but I think it's a smaller vessel that gets hit by the wall of water.

I went to see Poseidon last night... overall, a good hour and a half of entertainment, suspense, and adrenaline. The plot lacks depth (no pun intended) but really, I wasn't expecting much on that end. LOL Rogue wave hits cruise ship, ship flips over, lotta' people die, a few people decide to figure their way out, etc... The action during the flip, and all associated carnage was very well done in my opinion.

There's a few glaring errors though... (The bow thruster scene... ugh!)

Anyways, I got to thinking... just how plausible is it that a ship would actually stay upside down were it to get rolled broadside by a massive wave?

I would say very plausible. Self-righting designs are rare, especially in the very large sizes.

Kelly

Not neccessarily "self-righting"... but what are the chances that the wave would actually roll the vessel past 90 degrees? Once the superstructure is totally sideways and hits the water, the force to push it under, and roll the bottom up over top would have to increase even more, wouldn't it?

It is most likely that she would capsize once at 90 degrees. The superstructure
is not designed to be totally watertight like a hull. Once water enters the vessel rolls to upside down.
See the pictures of "In Full Bloom" from a few months ago.

Yes, it would roll as water rushes in... but wouldn't roll directly because of the wave itself. In the movie, the cruise ship went over 180 degrees in one smooth motion.

I don't know anything about waves but I would say after the top of the wave breaks and hit the ship,just about that time the base of the wave will be following and lift the hull to help it over. thats my guess. Think of those "pipelines" they surf. the whole oceon upsets on it self.