Waterfield, how many refrigerators?

Whats the biggest wave youve ever seen, W?

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“…Wave size is a topic of perennial dispute among surfers…
….indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before the locals will call it eight feet. The subscientific arbitrariness of the whole business is obvious from the fact that among surfers, wherever they live there is no such thing as a nine-foot wave or a thirteen-foot wave. (anyone who says there is would be laughed off the beach)
Ricky Grigg, an oceanographer and big-wave surfer, used to phone a friend who lived at Waimea Bay for surf reports when he lived in Honolulu. His friend’s wife, who could see the surf from her kitchen, could never grasp surfer’s irrational system of wave measurement, but she could estimate with fair accuracy how many refrigerators stacked on top of one another would equal the height of the waves, so Grigg used to ask her, ‘How many refrigerators is it?’…
….Buzzy Trent, an old-time, big-wave rider allegedly said, ‘Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.’ If he said that, he got it right. The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten –but from sixty-four to a hundred…this is a brute fact all surfers know in their bowels…”
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William Finnegan. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life