Others are waves that overlay long-distance swells from earlier storms. Such accumulations of energy can travel in threes—a phenonemon called “the three sisters”—and are so huge that they can be tracked by radar. There are cases of the three sisters crossing the Atlantic Ocean and starting to shoal along the 100-fathom curve off the coast of France. One hundred fathoms is six hundred feet, which means that freak waves are breaking over the continental shelf as if it were a shoreline sandbar. Most people don’t survive encounters with such waves, and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by,
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