I think if you look, you'll find just off of South Africa (CapeHorn maybe ?) the biggest and narliest waves, mostly because of the short distance between continents and thus squeezing one of the larger ocean currents.

Most massive rogue waves and, of course, ship sinkings.

Used to be a Discovery junky until they stopped being Discovery. Doh !

Very cool video! Check out the bretz floods sometime if you like geological history.

I recall Portugal having some monsters as well. That's where Garrett McNamara was going for a big wave surfing record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garret...a#World_record

I body-surfed a 60'er at LOTO, but the body-surfing record was 60'3" on Lake Michigan. Missed it by THAT much.

I've been in some big stuff in my days in the Gulf Got caught midway between the Tortugas and fort Myers by a front whipping thru mid April.

Blew 50 for 3 hours before it went down to 35 for the next 3 . When daylight came I was in Awe how Damn big the waves were.

Every bit of 15 to 20, we were 50 miles offshore in 150 feet of water.

Little known fact, Christopher Columbus wanted to take the easy way to America so he picked the ocean instead of the fierce Great Lakes!

Well, NOAA isn't always accurate, either. 3-5, 2-4, 4-6, etc. They aren't exact even in their forecast or report. I've been in "6'ers" by NOAA that were just like 8-10 by NOAA and sometimes 10-12 by NOAA on a different day. As far as 80 mph in a 32'er? If you're in 10'ers, you're going to be running an rpm to run 60 mph just to get up the wave. I was shocked at the rpm I was running to just move forward in 8-10's. NOAA said 6'ers, and we were the only boat out from South Haven to St Joe (other than the BIG CG boat that can roll over and not sink). I've been from MI City to Chicago in NOAA 5'ers and boats all over the water (they were nice, well spaced rollers). So, NOAA isn't much better than the buddy you have with the 32' boat after 6 beers. LOL!.

The main problem is, you can run in 3' or more in many boats, but you aren't going to stop and anchor....nothing like your swim platform smacking you in the chin trying to get on and off the boat.

You should change your screen name to Cliff Clavin....

So how does the Bering Sea in January compare to LOTO on 4th of July?

heres how to sum it up: Betty Cook broke the boat on the other side of the lake and got out and took a car back around she said "ive never see anything soo rough" now do your homework if you dont remember her !

Big seas and bad weather are endlessly fascinating, right?

Here's all I have to add to this discussion: At least with the Pacific Ocean, swells most often follow a directional pattern—washing machine water is rare. We have no continental shelf so the ocean depths just a few miles offshore can be several thousand feet deep. So even when the swells are big, and my home is about 20 miles from the famed Mavericks surf spot (and 30 miles to Ocean Beach, the scene of the infamous Donzi video) they tend to roll and be pretty evenly spaced. Of course, when they hit something shallow and break (rule of thumb is waves break when the water depth is half their height) they become a big-time hazard to navigation, and the risk in navigating in areas such Mavericks and Ocean Beach is that the reef or sandbars can go farther out than you think.

That said, I once took out a 27-foot Formula in 10- to 15-foot glassy swells off Ventura, where Powerboat magazine had its offices. We played it conservatively, the boat never left the water and it was a non-event. A few years earlier, Courtney Smith took me for a ride in a 38-foot Baja in three- to four-foot Lake Michigan slop and I thought I was going to die.

I had a similarly unpleasant experience going out Holgate Inlet in New Jersey in a 33-foot Donzi, but those were four- to six-footers with odd cresting eight-footer thrown in, just for fun.

To the point, I think it's tough to say where the roughest water is until you've gone boating in unruly conditions in a lot of different places. For me, however, Lake Michigan has delivered the most consistent beatings, foot for foot in wave height, of anywhere.