- the native canadian

Corydon Ireland
Staff writer

(July 13, 2005) — On the Fourth of July, Ronald Arndt invited friends over to his beachfront home in Kendall, Orleans County. He supplied the refreshments.

The entertainment was supplied by Rochester's high-speed ferry, plying Lake Ontario waters 2 miles offshore: a 10-minute succession of crashing waves 3 or more feet high.

Coming up

Thursday: The ferry uses about 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel on a one-way trip to Toronto and emits 2 metric tons of nitrogen oxide in a day.

The waves appeared 14 minutes after the ferry passed by, said Arndt, a veteran of the phenomenon from last year.

He and other shoreline property owners say the waves originate with the ferry's wake, the trail of turbulent water that flows behind any power watercraft.

Complaints started in 2004, when the Spirit of Ontario was launched by its first management company, Canadian American Transportation Systems.

Nothing was done then, though comments were collected and logged by the U.S. Coast Guard's marine safety office in Buffalo.

This year, Monroe County is studying wave action in four coastal towns and Rochester, with the help of volunteer observers. Preliminary data will be compiled this weekend.

Mary Lou Greibus, a lakeside resident in Greece since the 1950s, said the ferry sloshes a few waves onto her beach but not enough to matter.

"When it first started to go (in 2004), we stood out and waved like 2-year-olds," she said. "Most of us would love to see it fly."

Differing opinions

While many shoreline residents are upset about the waves that follow in the ferry's wake, other lakeside property owners say they don't feel or see the waves much. Both camps are right. High-energy waves from fast ferries affect only parts of nearby shorelines, depending on topography, water depth, weather and other factors, experts say.

Greibus barely notices waves from the ferry on the breakwall in front of her Edgemere Drive house. The concrete barrier is designed to moderate wave action and prevent erosion.

At his shoreline house along the lake in Charlotte, Max McCarthy said his beach, 300 feet deep, buffers any waves the ferry sends his way. To him, the ferry is a just a pretty sight.

But as far east as Durand-Eastman beach last year, Rachel Rock of Rochester said the post-ferry surf got so high that she had to get her three young daughters out of the water. "It was dangerous," she said.

In Summerville, on the Irondequoit shoreline near the Genesee River, Bonnie Oakes said the ferry's wake tears into the breakwall her condominium association has spent $140,000 on over the years.

"It's going to have to be shored up again," she feared.

In Hilton, Ampor Beach resident Victoria Thomas said post-ferry swells roll invisibly over the lake.

About 20 minutes later, they suck the water out like a fast tide. Waves crash back, slamming into her concrete breakwall, boat ramp and beach.

"You really can't see them," she said of the swells, which crest suddenly only when they hit shallow water.

Thomas remembers one swell that picked up her boat trailer and threw it like a toy from one side of the ramp to the other.

"I can understand they want to make money," she said of the fledgling ferry venture. "But it could be more convenient to residents."

Arndt, the Kendall homeowner, said: "God bless the mayor, who loves this thing. But they ought to close it down."

He called the sudden swells "absolutely dangerous," and he expects the ferry's waves to erode his shoreline.

"This (ship) is going way too fast," said Arndt, who owns a funeral home in Greece, "and it's not far enough out."

Frank "Duke" Kimmel, a member of the Payne Beach Association in Greece west of Braddock Bay, said the waves are at least a source of conversation among shoreline residents.

"You can tell when the ferry goes out," he said. "It whomps on the breakwalls pretty good."

Measuring waves

Officials are aware of the wave issue and are responding.

In late June, volunteer coast watchers in Irondequoit, Rochester, Greece, Hamlin and Parma started recording the height of waves after the ferry passes, along with other data, including weather conditions and the duration of waves.

"We'll have watch points for wave action," said Kathryn Firkins, spokeswoman for the town of Greece. The study idea emerged from meetings between Bay Ferries Great Lakes, which operates The Cat, and town supervisors, she said.

Bay Ferries "has the experience to direct waves to minimize the shore impact," said Doherty.

The company, hired to manage The Cat, will monitor the situation "to evaluate different operating plans," he wrote.

The ferry makes its trip to Toronto 15 minutes slower than last year, which could help pacify shoreline residents slapped around by waves from The Cat's wake. "We're attempting to mitigate that problem as much as possible," said Don Cormier, a vice president for Bay Ferries Great Lakes.

"I don't think we can build an expectation that the ship won't produce any wake at all," he added. "We can't make that disappear, but we can minimize the impact."

Making waves

Okey Nwogu, a civil engineer at the University of Michigan and an expert in wake wash and ship-generated waves, said the issue "is very critical, depending on what you have along shore."

Models of wake action are common, he said, especially among naval architects who design hulls for maximum efficiency.

But shipbuilders care most about wakes in the immediate vicinity of the ship, not waves that hit on shore minutes and miles later.

With a fast-moving ferry, a wave can appear "out of nowhere," said Nwogu, who first sharpened his observations in Hong Kong and later as an expert in lawsuits involving ferries in British Columbia and Seattle.

The faster the ship, the longer the waves it generates and the greater the impact it can have on land — sucking the water away from shore, then cracking it back to shore, said Nwogu.

This "tsunami effect," he said, is amplified in narrow channels, like the boat dock that tossed Thomas's trailer back and forth.

But complicated mathematical models and projections of ferry wave action, Nwogu said, have to be tempered with field data such as wave height, power and sediment disturbances.

Not many people call him for software or advice on near-shore wave dynamics, he said, "except lawyers."

And going to a lawyer is already a subject of conversation among Arndt's beachfront neighbors in Kendall.

"People are upset — this is bad," he said of rogue waves from the ferry. "You can't hear them, then there's a roar."

CIRELAND@democratandchronicle.com