March 11, 2011 Friday

Tsunami

Today was a special day.

This morning the news on the radio blasted that a major earthquake hit off the NE coast of Japan, magnitude 9.0, and had set off a tsunami. The International tsunami warning system had sent alerts to all sites around the Pacific Ocean including Northern California, Oregon and Washington State.

We have had tsunami warnings before and nothing became of them. I would stick to my plan for the day and head to the beach. Coming out of the forest on the Panoramic Highway and getting my first view of the ocean, cars were parked all long the twisting road to Stinson Beach. Residents of Stinson had moved their cars up the mountain just in case the tsunami was for real. “Did they know something I didn’t?” I turned on Newstalk KGO on the car radio. They were interviewing a professor from a local university, an expert on earthquakes and tsunamis. He calmly stated that the tsunami was for real; it had set off a series of waves that were moving at a speed of 500 miles per hour and would reach California around 8:30 am at heights of two to four feet.

“Five hundred miles per hour? That’s fast,” I commented out loud. The professor calmly continued stating that the waves were traveling at about the same speed as a commercial jet. That’s right, a flight from SFO to Tokyo takes about ten hours.

At eight-thirty, Marty and I were standing on the seawall at Bolinas watching the crowd surf the Patch. Things looked normal. The tide was low and some of the rocks of the Patch reef were peeking above the water. Surf was three to four feet and six surfers were out there, including David who rides the Becker board, Mark the archaeologist and stand-up guys Frank and Russ. Marty and I decided to skip going out. A tsunami was an unknown that we didn’t need to challenge. We moved up to Terrace Road above the Patch to get a better view of the ocean.

The Big Suck

“Loren, look at the water, it’s up against the seawall. It was low tide just a few minutes ago,” Marty pointed out. Then it started, the water receded, as Frank called it later, The Big Suck began.

Our jaws dropped, we couldn’t believe it. I stood there with my camera snapping away to record this phenomenon. In a mere six minutes, the water moved out causing the lowest of low tides I have ever seen at Bolinas. All the rocks of the Patch reef were high and dry. With a normal minus tide, the top of the outside rock would peak above the surface. It now stood fully exposed. That’s it in the above photo. All the rock shelves along the cliff to the Duxbury Point were exposed, and further out rocks we have never seen before appeared. Six minutes later the water started to come back in and soon the outside rock and the rock shelves were submerged again.

The surfers at the Patch got spooked and came in. “As soon as I saw that outside rock completely exposed I headed for shore,” Frank commented.

“Did you catch the smell out there? It smelled like rotten seaweed,” David said as he walked up the beach. “I have never smelled anything like that out there before.” We figured it was permanently submerged kelp hitting the open air for the first time. It was not a pleasant smell.

“Old Fred there said that he has lived and fished in Bolinas for forty-five years and has never seen those rocks before,” exclaimed an excited young surfer who was standing on the cliff near Marty and me. I have surfed Bolinas for over twenty years and that was the first time I had seen those outer reefs. The water continued to recede and return for the next five hours, but that first one, The Big Suck, was the most extreme.

Marty and I walked to the end of Wharf Road to see what was happening at the mouth of the lagoon. A crowd was standing at the end of the road along with a television truck and crew taking videos. “Here it comes again,” someone called. The lagoon was drained and now a one-foot wave was coming through the Channel. The wave broke and peeled left along of Seadrift bank of the Channel. Unlike a normal breaker, this wave kept coming. Normal waves break, their energy quickly dissipates and the white water peters out on the shore. Not this wave, it was a surge that kept coming. Its energy and height stayed constant as it pushed its way into the middle of the lagoon. A few minutes later the water drained out of the lagoon leaving it nearly bone dry. This action continued until the late afternoon.

“What was it like out there?” I asked a shortboarder who had just exited the water. Marty and I had returned to the seawall to watch four surfers that were fighting the currents and offshore winds to scratch into some head-high peaks at the Channel.

“It was really weird. I thought I heard the cry of a thousand souls. The peaks kept moving, the depth kept shifting and the currents pushed us around. The depth would be overhead and a few moments later I would be standing in six inches of water. It was really weird.”

That afternoon, Captain Kip forwarded a series of YouTube videos of local impacts of the tsunami. From high on the ridge in Tiburon, the one showed a well-formed two-foot surge come through Richardson’s Bay to strike Belvedere, Tiburon and Sausalito. After seeing that first wave (same time as the Big Suck) Kip suited up and rode a later surge on his stand-up. He claimed it was like riding a boat wake, nothing special but at least he can boast that he rode a tsunami.

He also had forwarded two videos that showed the tsunami surge destroying boats and piers in Santa Cruz. At the time of the Big Suck, a surge poured into a narrow shallow canal of boat slips filled with boats that smashed boats into one another and into pier pilings. Within seconds, boats and debris were being pushed along at the head of the surge wave. In the second video, water moving back out to sea caused the same destruction. The surge going out was just as fast and strong as the one coming in.

Kip’s company has a fleet of pilot boats used to direct cargo ships in and out of the San Francisco Bay. In an email I asked him if their boats had suffered any damage. He responded no because their boats were tied up in deep water. The harbor in Crescent City like Santa Cruz experienced considerable damage. In 1964, a tsunami caused by the earthquake in Alaska destroyed several fishing boats in Crescent City. This time the International tsunami warning system provide a ten hour alert and over one hundred fishing boats moved out of the Crescent City harbor and anchored in deep water of the open ocean. Open ocean deep water was the best protection against the tsunami surge. Crescent City and Santa Cruz harbors have narrow openings to the sea that focused the tsunami wave like a funnel into their shallow harbors.

That evening after watching the news reports, I was awed by the “pond effect” of the Pacific Ocean. Throwing a pebble in a pond of water causes a series of ripples to travel to the entire rim of the pond. Mother nature just tossed a massive stone into the Pacific Ocean setting off series of waves that cause devastation in Japan and millions of dollars of damage thousands of miles away in California. These forces shouldn’t surprise us. The cherished south swells we enjoy travel thousands of miles from New Zealand where they begin as thirty to forty-foot swells created by raging winds off Antarctica to become neatly groomed three to four-foot waves in Northern California. From now on I will take tsunami warnings serious.

Click on the link below to view my tsunami photos of Bolinas. Also thanks to Jim the jazz guitarist, the last ten photos are of Dillon Beach during the Big Suck taken by a friend of Jim’s.

Lorenzo's Tsunami Photos