Tumultuous

Just a few hours south of here in Minnesota and Wisconsin, they are getting feet of snow.  But here,  gale winds are keeping most of it at bay, and we have some amazing waves to watch.  This morning Mr. TOF had swimming lessons.  Afterward, he, The Banana and I headed to the bakery to get bread.  Since there was a wave alert posted, I thought it would be good to drive past the beach.  The waves did not disappoint.  In fact, after watching them for more than 30 minutes, we decided to drive up the North Shore just a tiny bit to Stony Point to see what the big waves looked like there as well.  

This blobby wave might be my favorite. 

Near the beach the sediment was stirred up, so the water was a deep red/brown.

This wave kind of looks like it could gobble up people.  If you got any closer it probably would!  The waves were crashing over the road in places and through ice chunks across the road!  We were parked by a picnic table that is quite a substantial distance away from the beach, and the waves made it up past the picnic table.  They sometimes made it just a couple of feet from our car.  It was astounding. 

That rock pile is the rocks the kidlets are always climbing on when we visit the beach.  The tallest rocks are 8-10 feet high at least.  I know they look tiny down there, but check out how high the spray got when the waves crashed in:

On one side of Stony Point a troop of surfers were out.  There was a lot of traffic on the tiny little gravel road, so we didn’t stop there, but we did stop on the other side of the point to see the water approaching.  There were a lot of people out and about here too.  The waves were crashing so high that spray was covering our car.  The wind was so strong you couldn’t stay out for long at a time, but we had a lot of fun watching out the window.  The pictures really don’t do any of it justice, but they especially don’t capture the wildness of Stony Point, which was even more furious than the beach.  What you can’t tell from the picture is how far up that spray is reaching because you can’t really see the distance of the cliffs here. The water was a deep blue at Stony Point because the floor of the lake is more rocky and since there is not any river or stream nearby, there is not a lot of sediment right here, meaning that the water is much more clear. These images didn’t really capture the pretty color of the water very well either. One of the best parts of watching the water at Stony Point was seeing the enormous swells far out into the lake before they approached.  It was such a mass of rolling water.

Eventually we brought our bread home, made toast, and snuggled up in front of the fire for a lazy afternoon of reading good books.