Posted by seahunt on January 02, 2002 at 10:31:27:
THe recent post about waves reminded me of a tale I relate for
how much it amused me when I read it. I hope you enjoy it as
much as I did and I hope that I can do it justice in the
retelling.
This is interpreted by memory from the book 'Waves and Beaches".
The book was a text book for a class at UCSC...
The author, much older at the time, tells the story of his
testing of DUWKs for the Navy at the start of WW 2. He's this
Kansas boy, about 17, who has never seen the ocean before. He
is sent with a crew to see how DUWK's perform in waves, at the
mouth of the Colombia River... Think about that.
A DUWK, dang, cannot remember what the acronym means, but
it is one of those amphibious trucks the Navy had that were
designed as landing craft. The front wheels would actually
drop down on the wave and surf it... or so the designers
figured.
Well, his first look at the ocean was as they came to the
Pacific Ocean. They got settled in and went to a bar where the
local Coast Guard boys hung out. The CG guys said 'sure, go out
to the sand bars at the mouth of the river and you'll find waves
as big as you ever wanted, say up to 25 feet'. They also sorta
tacitly let it be known that the Navy folks were on their own...
So, on with the testing. The fact that he lived to tell
about it says that they worked pretty well. They started out
in smaller waves and worked their way up to the big ones. He
said that it was pretty wild. On a 25 foot wave the craft
would rise up like it was going to flip and water would be
flying everywhere so that you couldn't even see. Then as you
though it was going to go under all the way, it would surge
forward and just go plowing along on this huge wave.
That's what I call an adventure...
Enjoy the diving, seahunt