It was February 1993, and we were nearing the end of a Southern Ocean voyage that could charitably be described as vexing. A Force 11 pounded us, wave after wave coating the decks with bitterly cold water that rapidly froze into layer upon layer of ice. Our captain turned us into the storm, the wind so strong that even with the engines on full ahead the ship was making but a few knots. Overnight, as we struggled to sleep, the ship suffered a powerful blow, as I described several years later:
Nobody saw exactly what happened, but as best as anyone could figure out, the ship was hit broadside by an enormous freak wave. the wave was so powerful that it lifted the two-and-a-half ton Hurricane [a rigid-hulled inflatable boat] up in its cradle, snapping the straps that secured it in place. Only the stanchion next to the boat cradle prevented the boat from flying across the deck, although the pole itself buckled with the strain. Thwarted in its efforts to rip the Hurricane free of its shackles, the wave threw itself across the deck and slammed into the helicopter
The jolt from the wave shook the ship and its occupants; a few poked cautious heads out on to deck to survey the damage, and in the dusk saw the helicopter splayed sadly to one side, its leg struts snapped in half by the onrushing wave.
Some months later, safely back on dry land, I sat dockside and described the incident to a couple of friends who had not been on board. One, not accustomed to long spells on the open ocean, seemed disbelieving; if we had been steering into the waves, how could one have hit us directly from starboard? The other, a captain with whom I would later return to the Antarctic, stared ahead quietly.
"The sea," he said with the air of a man who is all too uncomfortably familiar with his subject, "does strange things."
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My shoresider friend was not alone in his skepticism. For many years, tales of "rogue" waves - and particularly those larger than the one that hit us - were dismissed as the fantasies of unhinged mariners. Although the term can apply to waves that come out of the blue and strike at odd angles, rogue or 'freak" waves are more often described as open-ocean waves that are abnormally larger than those around them. One statistical analysis suggested that such waves were extraordinarily uncommon, but a more recent study, which examined data compiled from European Space Agency satellites, found evidence of ten individual giant waves 75 feet or higher around the globe over a three-week period.
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The first rogue wave to have its dimensions recorded by a measuring instrument was the Draupner wave of 1995, which struck an eponymous oil platform in the North Sea during a storm and was determined by a downward-pointing laser pointer to have been approximately 85 feet high, substantially taller than the surrounding waves, which had an average height of around 30 feet.
