Quote:
Originally Posted by Tidybuoy
Just curious, what makes the Haulover Inlet have such extreme waves?
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From my experience with a mid-size offshore fishing boat
Haulover has a large body of water immediately inside the inlet (North Biscayne Bay), combined with a short, straight cut dumping into the ocean. It's essentially like a velocity stack, in that it accelerates the tidal flow beyond a normal rate. Add the not unusual significant onshore winds and you can get relatively large standing or slow moving waves with steep approaches in a hurry. An ugly situation for inexperienced boaters (or rental boaters..overloaded boats, pontoon boats, bow-riding bay cruisers, etc.) All typical for Haulover. It's also fairly narrow, leaving little room to navigate and often stacked with traffic weekends and holidays.
Most of the south Fla. inlets are straight-cut channels, and suffer any any time the tide and wind decide to come from opposite directions. Lighthouse Point was my home inlet, but the only inlets that never presented any challenges down there (other than getting run over by a cruise ship or freighter) were Lauderdale and Govt. Cut/Miami due to their sizeable width.