title: Rogue Wave

(see the full-size close-up below)

If you follow the California coast a few miles west of the beautiful coastal community of Carmel-By-The-Sea, you will see on your right a small sand beach descending to the water’s edge. Before you go down to the water which is really part of Monterey Bay, a sign announces that swimming is not allowed at this beach.

A few years ago, a family of five from Guatemala stopped at this beach. They had no intention of swimming. What they saw was a beautiful view of the ocean. Indeed, from this beach one could look right out across the bay to the distant glittering blue Pacific Ocean.

What a perfect place for a family snapshot. So they all walked down to the water’s edge, and lined up with first the mother and then the three children from the teenager to the toddler. It was a perfect day for a picture. The sun was bright, the sea was calm. The father stepped back with the family camera and framed them in the view-finder.

Suddenly, there was a subtle movement in the water behind them, a movement that no one saw. Nothing more than a long green shadow that raced toward land straight in from that distant Pacific Ocean. Had any of them turned and noticed it no one would not have been alarmed because it was no more than a wave.

But this one traveled at an enormous speed and was rising taller as it raced into the rapidly shallowing water. When it hit the steep gradient in front of the beach it rose like a towering green wall with its foaming ragged crest reaching forward like deadly white fangs.

Perhaps at the last instant the family heard its roar. No one knows. All that is known is that it suddenly broke over them unexpectedly and took the entire family away forever. Moments later only the drenched beach marked the high-water mark of this deadly rogue wave, a not uncommon occurrence along such beaches that offer a strikingly seductive view straight out to the glittering blue Pacific.

My Rogue Wave was photographed near that beach at a place called Inspiration Point. It is green for the inshore shallows of the bay. I gave it a pen and ink treatment to emphasize and freeze the details of these rare waves that can appear suddenly from a calm sea and sweep in with the deadliness of a small tsunami.

This is a close-up image from the full-size print, showing the detail involved