How realistic are "rogue waves"? What are the odds of them in the Carribean? Are cruise ships prepared?

Answer 1

Very realistic .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_wave

Answer 2

Rogue waves are a fact of oceangoing life. They are not fully undertood, though they are now regarded as the cause of a number of previously inexplicable sinkings, including the Merchant Vessel Derbyshire, which it's believed encountered a wave some 30m high during Typhoon Orchid (see link 3).
I used to work with NUMAST, the trade union for British Merchant Navy Officers, and their Senior National Secretary, Allan Graveson, is an authority on rogue waves, and has also survived a passage which encountered one. In early 2005, he was still calling on shipowners to make the necessary investment in build quality to save the lives of seafarers and passengers at sea (see the first link). Essentially, being built to cope with the phenomenon is the best defence we have, because while there are possible signals that a rogue wave is near, it's like flying through an electrical storm - you can say a bolt of lightning may be near, but you won't be able to do a thing about it till it hits you.

Cheery thought, eh?

Answer 3

Very realistic.

NOTORIOUS ROGUES

1883: An enormous wave sweeps over the 320-foot Glamorgan, sinking the ship.

1933: A 112-foot wave strikes the Navy tanker Ramapo in the North Pacific. The wave is so tall that it lines up with the ship’s crow’s nest.

1942: The ocean liner Queen Mary is hit by a 75-foot wave 700 miles west of Scotland while carrying 15,000 troops.

1973: A rogue wave off the coast of Durban, South Africa, strikes the 12,000-ton cargo ship Bencrauchan. The ship is towed into port, barely floating.

1976: The oil tanker Cretan Star radios for help: “Vessel was struck by a huge wave that went over the deck.” The ship is never heard from again.

2000: A 70-foot wave hits the cruise ship Oriana, smashing windows. That same month, a freak wave strikes a trawler off Ireland, killing eight men.

But rogue waves are not exactly solitons. Osborne says that they lie somewhere in the hierarchy between sine waves and solitons. His first glimpse of one came in 1999, when he saw a graph of the data on a wave that had struck a drilling rig in the North Sea on New Year’s Day in 1995. The wave was 85 feet high and half as broad as a football field. It arose out of a storm-tossed sea of 30-foot waves and swept across the deck of the (oil) rig at 45 miles per hour.

Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites

21 July 2004
Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.

Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such cases.
Mariners who survived similar encounters have had remarkable stories to tell. In February 1995 the cruiser liner Queen Elizabeth II met a 29-metre high rogue wave during a hurricane in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water… it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover."

And within the week between February and March 2001 two hardened tourist cruisers – the Bremen and the Caledonian Star – had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre rogue waves in the South Atlantic, the former ship left drifting without navigation or propulsion for a period of two hours.

Damage done by a rogue wave
"The incidents occurred less than a thousand kilometres apart from each other," said Wolfgang Rosenthal - Senior Scientist with the GKSS Forschungszentrum GmbH research centre, located in Geesthacht in Germany - who has studied rogue waves for years. "All the electronics were switched off on the Bremen as they drifted parallel to the waves, and until they were turned on again the crew were thinking it could have been their last day alive.

"The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels: two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."


I cannot speak to odds by location or cruise ship preparation....

Answer 4

If you had been watching the TV series "The Deadliest Catch", on the Discovery network this season, you would have seen what happens when a fishing boat gets hit by a rogue wave.
They captured it on camera and it nearly capsized the boat.
Catch it on the repeats.