My perfect Saturdays start like this: Early morning walk along the water, followed by coffee while blogging about waves. Today’s focus: The cool waves that birds make! First, let’s look at the weird way in which seagulls take off from water. They make a big splash which develops into ring-shaped waves. So far, so good. […]
A #friendlywaves post: you send me the pictures, I talk about physics! Today: My friend A sent me these lovely pictures from Lofoten, knowing I love wave watching. And there is so much to see! Let’s begin with the picture above, where we are looking out over the stern of a ship towards a bridge. There […]
Wakes are always interesting to watch. But usually, I am showing wakes of ships going straight ahead. So today, I have something cool for you: The wake of a ship doing a 90 degree turn! And what that does is that the feathery wake that is usually V-shaped now gets deformed! And this deformation of […]
What I love about my job (in addition to the awesome job itself, obviously)? That my office is located in pretty much the coolest spot in Hamburg when it comes to touristy views of the city. So much great wave watching (and ship watching) to be done here! For example below, see the small ferry on […]
A beautiful picture: the pink sky, purple clouds, a peaceful channel flowing in between lush greens that the calm water surface mirrors back, a bridge somewhere in the background, connecting the shores, both in reality and in the image on the water. Early morning harmony. Hygge? And what jumps at me? Waves! Which I think […]
The title says it all, I guess ;-) In the picture above, you can still see the ship on the left, and having seen the ship, I am sure you can recognise the turbulent wake in the picture below, too: It’s the lighter blue stripe towards the horizon with darker, rougher sea surface to either […]
Now that the weather is nice and sunny again, here is what it looked like only last Saturday. It wasn’t even really stormy, but windy enough so that the ships leaving the locks at Kiel Holtenau were working a lot harder than usual. Especially difficult when you are almost empty and then there is a […]
On Sunday, I set out to see a large cruise liner go through the locks at Kiel Holtenau. What happened, though, was that a ship with a smiley painted on its deck came first. Do you see the two shadows to the right of the ship, the left one aligning with the one side of […]
Some throwback Friday evening wave watching (at the locks at Kiel Holtenau with my friend Sara for a nice and relaxing end of the week) to start the new week. The best! First: The pilot boat going towards the locks. Unusually visible wake — they are going fast today! Plus an interesting sheltering of waves: […]
Berlin is full of interesting history to discover … for example that of ships that have gone past on the Spree! :-D Let’s start with some easy wave watching. In the picture above, you see a ship and its wake (both parts: the turbulent one where the ship has gone, and the feathery wake that […]
I just love this picture: The two boats in the front are going at the same speed (the trainer is driving right next to the person in the row boat over a long distance), yet look at how different the two ships’ wakes look! The motor boat has this huge, breaking, turbulent wake. Even though […]
You know how they say that the journey is the destination? That was certainly the case for my spontaneous mini-vacation yesterday (and how awesome is it that my #BestTravelBuddy is up for a cross country trip on a day’s notice?). We went all the way from the east coast to the west coast — which […]
Have you ever noticed how much you can observe when you look at water from a distance? For example in these pictures, you see the tracks of ships that are long out of sight! Do you see the circle that one obviously drove before leaving our field of view? For the ships far out in […]
Beautiful morning arriving back in Kiel… Looking downwind, the weather might seem pleasant (especially when focussing on the sunrise). But looking upwind however, the wind rows on the water as well as the white caps on the waves indicate that it’s quite windy! Very cool: the turbulent wake of a ship interrupts the wave field […]
Wave watching from high up gives you a whole new perspective on wakes, and depending on the lighting, features in the wave field become more prominent or fade away. See for example below the ferry: You very prominently see the turbulent wake right behind the ship, and you see the waves of the wake opening […]
Even when I fully intend to just go for a Saturday afternoon walk to catch up with a friend, this is what happens… I get distracted by waves. Like the crisscrossing pattern of waves and their reflections that you see below. Or the amazing bow waves of ships passing by. Isn’t it fascinating what a […]
Let me tell you the story of the picture below. I was walking along Kiel fjord with some friends and we saw this mama duck with all those tiny cute ducklings. We stopped and oooo’d and aaaaa’d and they were just so adorable!! But the after a while they swam on and we continued walking. […]
