A Voyage for Madmen (2011)
“However, South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, at latitude 34 degrees south, receives solid doses of Southern Ocean weather and poses its own peculiar hazards for mariners attempting to round Africa between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Their problem is the Agulhas current, an immensely strong confluence of water that funnels south out of the Indian Ocean through the Mozambique Channel until it is a concentrated arterial torrent quite separate from the cold ocean around it, pumping south and west... off the cape coast directly against the prevailing westerly wind systems of the Southern Ocean. When these westerly gales, or the cape’s sudden ‘southerly busters,’ blow across the Agulhas, wind and water collide, creating heaping turbulence on a scale seen nowhere else on Earth. Extraordinary freak seas and holes develop. Ships hundreds of feet long have literally fallen off giant waves, plunged through the deep hole-like troughs, and kept on going down. The Agulhas phenomenon occurs mainly along the 100-fathom line paralleling the coast, but gyres of warm Agulhas water spin off from the main stream and curl like beckoning fingers far out into the cold Southern Ocean.MoreLess
Their problem is the Agulhas current, an immensely strong confluence of water that funnels south out of the Indian Ocean through the Mozambique Channel until it is a concentrated arterial torrent quite separate from the cold ocean around it, pumping south and west... off the cape coast directly against the prevailing westerly wind systems of the Southern Ocean. When these westerly gales, or the cape’s sudden ‘southerly busters,’ blow across the Agulhas, wind and water collide, creating heaping turbulence on a scale seen nowhere else on Earth. Extraordinary freak seas and holes develop. Ships hundreds of feet long have literally fallen off giant waves, plunged through the deep hole-like troughs, and kept on going down. The Agulhas phenomenon occurs mainly along the 100-fathom line paralleling the coast, but gyres of warm Agulhas water spin off from the main stream and curl like beckoning fingers far out into the cold Southern Ocean.MoreLess
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