Comments on: Storm vs Tanker

Storm vs Tanker

jonson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:40:25 -0800

Amazing photoseries of 70 foot storm waves crushing the surface of a large tanker in the North Pacific. More on the post-storm damage here.

By: ktoad

ktoad — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:45:41 -0800

Ouch, a Geocities fpp. Recipe for a website overload?

By: owhydididoit

owhydididoit — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:51:17 -0800

sadly, nothing to see here...

By: knapah

knapah — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:51:26 -0800

Does a good job of showing you the power of the sea..... and what many many tons of water can do to our puny little efforts.

By: owhydididoit

owhydididoit — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:52:10 -0800

oops! second time's a charm... thanks, jonson!

By: Greg Nog

Greg Nog — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:54:36 -0800

Wow. The only thing more terrifying than all those waves is all that comic sans. Keen photos!

By: jonson

jonson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:04:41 -0800

It's a coral cache of the geocities post, hopefully it should hold up.

By: sgt.serenity

sgt.serenity — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:11:41 -0800

great post !

By: pax digita

pax digita — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:13:10 -0800

I dunno if I can find it online, but I've seen a picture of a "Stoof" (S2F) antisubmarine patrol aircraft being catapulted off the bow of a 1960s aircraft carrier while green water was coming over the bow. A piston-engine airplane can keep running (albeit briefly) with such a dousing; a jet engine will flame out.

By: squidfartz

squidfartz — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:13:23 -0800

DAY-um! Nice images. He said fellas, it's been nice to know ya Excellent post.

By: elpapacito

elpapacito — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 16:58:08 -0800

Arrrrrrrrrrr ! Ye mateys found more rrrrespect for piratez sailors arrr ??

By: snsranch

snsranch — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:08:43 -0800

Way better than the sucking nautical vortex on Mythbusters! Mythbusters : Blar. jonson : Yarrrrr!!!!!!!

By: antifuse

antifuse — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:36:57 -0800

I was expecting much more damage. Like the sides of it being crushed in or something. Boo.

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:46:29 -0800

"I was expecting much more damage. Like the sides of it being crushed in or something." Come on, that dining table was totally ruined!

By: gottabefunky

gottabefunky — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:03:36 -0800

Is there a working cache of this anywhere?

By: jonson

jonson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:41:39 -0800

gottabefunky; I don't understand what you're saying. Is the link not working for you (unlike for others in this thread)?

By: docpops

docpops — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:45:59 -0800

doesn't work for me either

By: sergeant sandwich

sergeant sandwich — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:48:58 -0800

well, the officers mess looks to be appropriately named anyway!

By: spock

spock — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:49:58 -0800

Now THAT's an Officers mess. </obvious>

By: spock

spock — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:50:23 -0800

missed it by THAT much!

By: jonson

jonson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:01:28 -0800

doesn't work for me either weird... maybe something about your location doesn't work well with coral caching? Either way, here's the original geocities link (grab it quick, cause it won't last long).

By: Mave_80

Mave_80 — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:35:46 -0800

Fantastic. Great post.

By: craven_morhead

craven_morhead — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:41:22 -0800

The guy uses more than his fair share of exclamation points. That aside, the photos are amazing.

By: Busithoth

Busithoth — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:01:54 -0800

wow. imagine that while powered by sails alone. tremendous post, thankee!

By: Relay

Relay — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:06:22 -0800

Yeah, that's nice, but you can't surf it. Find me something that big that's ridable, and then I'd be interested.

By: RavinDave

RavinDave — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:42:02 -0800

I always wanted to go out on a ship like that ... until now.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:52:12 -0800

Holy shit. The entire time I was taking my (lol) canoeing experiences and multiplying it by ten million times and thinking to myself, "shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit" seeing those waves. If they can even be called waves. They look like mountains.

By: Busithoth

Busithoth — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:08:28 -0800

you know, I wish people chased these like they do tornados. I think these are more fascinating.

By: TwoWordReview

TwoWordReview — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:23:28 -0800

I've said it before and I'll say it again. When it comes to the sea, we are her bitch!

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 05:55:32 -0800

Whoa!

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 06:44:58 -0800

That reminds me, I need to get a puke-protection screen for my digital camera.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:23:57 -0800

jonson writes "maybe something about your location doesn't work well with coral caching?" It uses port 8090 which is blocked by many firewalls.

By: maxpower

maxpower — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:55:18 -0800

I love pictures of big waves. Its hard to get a sense of the scale involved, but if you look at the pictures of the boat docked and then try to imagine that same size of boat being towered over by waves... crazy.

By: jdroth

jdroth — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:53:53 -0800

This reminds me of a bit from my favorite Aubrey-Maturin novel, HMS Surprise. The Surprise has been dispatched to ferry an envoy to China. After touching in Brazil, our heroes make for the tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. As the journey southward continues, they begin to encounter albatross, and they begin to kill them. (Sailors have a superstitious fear of the albatross, the history of which I do not fully comprehend.) Stephen doesn't care for this wanton killing, and asks Jack to order its halt. The sailors become convinced that this is a bad omen, and sure enough: the Surprise is beset by stormy seas, trapped for days in enormous (50 ft!) swells:

During the night Stephen heard a number of bumps and cries through his sleep, and he was aware of a change of course, for his cot no longer swung in the same direction. But he was not prepared for what he saw when he came on deck. Under the low grey tearing sky, half driving rain, half driving spray, the whole sea was white — a vast creaming spread as far as the eye could see. He had seen the Bay of Biscay at its worst, and the great south-west gales on the Irish coast: they were nothing to this. for a moment the whole might have been a wild landscape, mountainous yet strangely regular; but then he saw that the whole was in motion, a vast majestic motion whose size concealed its terrifying dreamlike speed. Now the crests and troughs were enormously greater; now they were very much farther apart; and now the crests were curling over and breaking as they came, an avalanche of white pouring straight down before the steep face. The Surprise was running almost straight before them, east by south; she had managed to strike her mizentopmast at first light — anything to diminish the wind-pressure aft and thus the risk of broaching-to — and man-ropes were rigged along her streaming deck. As his eyes reached the level of the quarterdeck he saw a wave, a green-grey wall towering above the taffrail, racking towards them — swift inevitability. He strained his head back to see its top, curving beyond the vertical as it came yet still balancing with the speed of its approach, a beard of wind-torn spray flying out before it. He heard Jack call an order to the man at the wheel: the frigate moved a trifle from her course, rose, tilting her stern skywards so that Stephen clung backwards to the ladder, rose and rose; and the mortal wave swept under her counter, dividing and passing on to smother her waist in foam and solid water, on to bar the horizon just ahead, while the ship sank in the trough and the shriek of the rigging sank an octave as the strain slackened.

It's a great passage in a great book. I am awed by the might of the sea. (Of course there's another similar great passage a few books later as our heroes — aboard the "horrible old Leopard" — flee from the Dutch ship Waakzamheid. Fans will know what I mean...

By: stinkycheese

stinkycheese — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:11:33 -0800

Yowza! Awesome pics indeed, thanks. Glad I'm on land.

By: Marla Singer

Marla Singer — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:06:45 -0800

That picture of the gangway twisted up over the catwalk... YIPE! And I agree that looking at the pictures of the ship while docked and then imagining the waves towering over the bow really helps give some perspective on the size of the waves.

By: Miles Long

Miles Long — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:12:28 -0800

sublim e pics. beautiful and dangerous. Reminds you that the power of nature is effectively infinite. yeah, it's great to have the ship in the shot so we can judge the scale. All waves look alike.