Yep. I mostly meant for or rather caused by this kite. I wouldn't expect it intuitively, as it's just a big object in the water, not moving erratically or obstructing anything.
I've kitesurfed near the Broomway. Really nice stretches of flat water when you get it right, but the tide comes in at a scary speed - or you have a 45 minute walk to get to the water - if you're there at the wrong time. I've also had some hairy moments where I've jumped high and realised I really had to stick the landing as the water was only a few inches deep.
As with most dangerous tides, it's not the height of the tidal change that's the problem it's the fact that it's very flat that means it comes in so fast.
that's just the initial surface disturbance. it starts at the center of where the sphere breaches the water and has an amplitude. the disturbance radiates outward from that center, but there's no "sticking" to other meshes happening
In practice, wave action is caused by fetches across hundreds or thousands of kilometres of sea surface, and even offshore wind farms tend to be located within a few km of shorelines.
As with other impacts described, the potential interactions with bird life (strikes, kills, behavioural disruption), and of the artificial-reef effects of offshore turbine foundations and anchorages (probably largely positive) would all but certainly dominate these by many orders of magnitude.
They don’t take you out very far, but they push you away faster than you can swim, and it’s the struggle that gets you.
I hadn’t been told about them so I didn’t know what was happening, or that I just needed to move sideways. It isn’t obvious that you’re in a channel of water, and you just kind of notice that everyone is suddenly getting quite far away.
It got kind of scary and I tried to swim against it but it wasn’t working. I saw that I was drifting towards some small fishing boats so decided to swim with the current instead.
Problem is, scale is an illusion. By the time it stopped, the boats were still in the distance, but so was the beach. That’s when I got scared.
I don’t know for sure, I was young, but I think it was around 100 meters out. I swam back (it felt like it took a long time, but that’s probably because it was so cold - the UK isn’t famed for its seasides!)
But when I got back I ended up a fair walk away from where my family were lounging around, mum reading a book, dad making a very bad attempt at using a disposable barbecue. I told them what happened and they didn’t believe me.
During a flood I once saw a HV line that was occasionally dipping into the river. It would float down for a little bit, build up some tension, then shoot into the air creating a ~4-5 foot blue arc as the line shorted into the river before landing back in the water and producing a huge thumping sound.
That completely changed my perspective on all those quite lines dancing in the wind.
No, not particularly. It's already floating, so it will just drift away for the most part. Some smaller bits will probably fall off and produce some spectacular waves. By smaller bits, I mean stuff up to a cubic kilometer, so I wouldn't want to be standing next to it when it happens.
This is all much further south than cruise ships normally go though.
Big waves travel over long distances in the open sea.
But it's not the big waves that would disturb when you are floating around, they would just make you float up and down a bit. More disturbing are the small waves that are caused by nearby winds. At the ocean you very often have some wind nearby (depends on the region, season etc).
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