120 



CHARACTER OF SURF 



it is these that have been stressed the most often in published accounts, 

 because of their importance from an engineering standpoint. 



In severe easterly gales, for example, masses of water sometimes 

 entirely envelop Minot's Lighthouse, a 97-foot tower standing on an 

 off-lying ledge in the southern side of Massachusetts Bay (fig. 29) ; we 

 have seen it do so, ourselves. The bell has been broken loose by the 

 surf at a height of about 100 feet above sea level at the Bishop's Rock 



Figure 29. — Aerial photograph showing the surf almost wholly enveloping Minor's 

 Light, Massachusetts, during the gale of January 12, 1941. (Photograph, 

 courtesy of Edward R. Snow.) 



Light, England; the light tower has been broken in at an elevation of 

 195 feet on the Island of Uist in the Shetlands; the glass in the lamp 

 has been struck at an elevation of 158 feet at Tillamook Rock Light- 

 house on the coast of Oregon, where on February 11, 1902, water from 

 the surf fell back in solid masses upon the roof of the "dwelling 

 at a height of 200 feet above the sea. (See Johnson, 1919, for a long 

 list of happenings of this sort.) And we, ourselves, from the United 

 States Fisheries steamer Albatross, December 14, 1904, saw the surf 

 from a low swell, topped by a moderate sea, breaking right over the 

 lower parts of the islet Sala y Gomez, in the southeastern Pacific, with 

 sheets of spray flying even over its highest parts, some 80 feet above 

 sea level. Spray spouting upward over steep submerged ledges is also 



