Towering

I kept checking the wave heights last night and they remained at ~10 feet.  But when I checked again when I woke up today, I was impressed.  Early this morning the wave heights shot up to ~24 feet!  Click here to review the wave height graph from the offshore buoy.

There was light rain this morning, but I took a few pictures for the record:

 

 

These were very big waves.  It's hard to judge the heights of breaking waves, especially when it's stormy.  But I have a few photos with gulls for scale.  [Click on the images for larger versions.]  In the first photo below, there are two gulls — the one in the center (between waves) is the easiest to see:

 

And here's another where you can use the gull to estimate the height of the wave face.  Based on known measurements, the gull's wing span is ~58 inches, or ~4.8 feet.  You can then use the gull to estimate the height of the wave:

 

It depends on where you measure, but my estimate for this wave face came out to ~435 inches, or ~36 feet (~11 meters)!  That might be a bit high, but it gives you a feel for how big these waves were.

Although there's a lot of winter left, this was likely one of the biggest wave events of the season.