"Like a lake"

[beige_alert]

I just saw another example of this, and it's always amusing to me, when people, especially serious mariners, describe flat calm seas as "like a lake." I've spent most of my life near Lake Michigan. To me, Lake Michigan is the first example of "lake" that comes to mind. It's 190km by 490km and near 300 meters deep in the deepest part. (I see Google Earth has some new high-resolution photos of my favorite beach on the big lake. It's at a narrow spot, only 101km from the eastern shore in Michigan.) The sort of place 300 meter cargo ships sail and from time to time sink in the sort of storms that sink big ships. Oh, sure, sometimes it's flat calm, too. You know, "like a lake." But not usually, normally at least some little waves breaking on the shore on a pretty day, and, from time to time, very much more than that.

I've been out in Milwaukee's outer harbor, protected behind the outer breakwater, in my kayak, and plan to explore that some more, but I don't have the equipment or skills to dare go out past the wall into the actual lake itself. 125km from the breakwater light to the very nearest land on the other side (and typically the wind is blowing in that general direction, but probably not directly toward the nearest land).

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

"I've told these kids a hundred times, don't take the lakes for granted
They'll go from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted
And tonight some red-eyes Wiarton girl lies staring at the wall
For her lover's gone into the white squall."

Stan Rogers, of course.

[hrrunka]

Curious thing, language. "Like a lake" only works for very small values of "lake". Over here the expression would be "like a mill pond". I've been caught in squalls in the crater lake at Naivasha, and even in that fairly small body of water the waves were big enough to cause a small boat to ship water.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Calling the Great Lakes 'lakes' is rather like calling Milton Keynes a 'town' (it is, technically, and not a 'city' even though they like to call it such). They are effectively inland freshwater seas (I'm not sure if they have noticable tides, which used to be part of the definition).

The crater lake is of course only part of Lake Naivasha, which at around 6km across is at least small enough to see the other side but well big enough to get wind building up sizable waves.

But even the ones in the Lake District (Cumbria), of which only one is actually called 'lake' (the rest are 'meres' or 'waters') can build up pretty severe waves.

(Whoever said "calm as a millpond" was presumably thinking of a closed-down mill, any ponds around watermills are definitely not calm...)

[hrrunka]

The crater lake is largely protected from the main lake by the crater walls, and the worst of the main lake's waves have a bit of trouble getting round the corner and into it. The squalls, however, can whip up short-wavelength choppiness given about fifty yards run-up...

In the Lakes many of the bodies of water are long and narrow, and the wind tends to get channelled along their length.

[poltr1]

Just curious as to why you list your units in metric. Not all of us in the States have converted yet.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Lake Michigan-Huron (the connecting channel is five miles wide, the lakes have the same "sea-level" and hyrologically and geologically they are a single body of water with a pinch point (five miles wide!)) is the largest (by area) freshwater lake in the world (Caspian and Black seas are salt water, Baikal has greater volume as it's deeper, so is Superior)

Just thought it was interesting!

And yes, I've been rowing on lakes that were very choppy!

I've photographed Loch Ness early in the morning to get it as flat as possible, because later in the day it wasn't possible to get the mirror reflection (look at most blurry shots of Nessie to see the waves!)

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

heh, yours is the first non-UK reply so far!

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

They are the usual units I usually use. None of the Germans have commented yet--to them they are as normal as can be!

Although my point was that these lakes are bigger than human scale, at these sorts of human scales the kilometers are familiar from sports. Nearly any race run at a standard distance is run at a standard round-number-of-kilometers distance. The runner's marathon isn't a round number of any units, of course, but if you run in an organized race shorter than the half-marathon it's almost certainly 10km. The shorter one than that is 5km. Any distance runner knows what 5 and 10 km feel like. The sprinters run their 500 and 1000 and 1500 meter and so on races, ice skaters similarly, on an oval with 100m straights. I ski whatever distance the trail turns out to be, but a formal organized ski race will be a 2.5km relay sprint, or 10 or 20 or 40 km or whatever. Cycle road races tend to be semi-random length, but watch one and you'll see the racers streaming past the banners indicating 5km to go or 1km to go. I don't race on a bicycle but I keep the display on mine set to the usual kilometers.

At a faster than human speed, I suppose it depends on what kind of car racing you watch, but when I watch a car race anytime they display a car's speed on the screen it's in km/hr (but the announcers are quick with their calculators).

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

As a Michigan resident who's spent a good number of vactions on and in the close proximity of the Great Lakes, I've never once heard any reference to tides on them. I've only seen tides as a novelty on trips to oceans.

Ah, a quick google search finds "According to the Canadian Hydrologic/Hydrographic Service, the Great Lakes experience tides from 1 to 4 cm."

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"I've photographed Loch Ness early in the morning to get it as flat as possible"

Ah, just after they've ironed it, before all the tourists start getting it rumpled again *g*.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Most people drive rather than racing (in any form), and ones in the US and UK will do so in miles. I have no idea what a racing car does in distance, but I know the distance I drive to work and that's in miles. (I also know the distances I drive to DFDF and FilkContinental, and those are in miles as well even though most of them are in NL and DE because my car says miles. Lots of them...) I can happy convert, though, but many can't.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Indeed, car driving is in miles over here. But anything I do under human power I use kilometers for, and the distance seems more meaningful if I travel it rather than sit through it. Of course anyone reading a blog post can just ask the google to convert units. "101 km in furlongs." "101 kilometers = 502.067923 furlongs" And here I was just fooling around and yet I just learned that it's roughly 5 furlongs to the km! Who knew?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Er, yes, it would be since there are 1.6 (near as dammit) kilometres to the mile and 8 furrow-longs to the mile.

In fact loads of things work out rather neatly. 100kph = 64 mph, 50kph = 30mph, 80kph = 50mph, etc. (to within the accuracy of a car speedometer). My usual cruising speed on a motorway is 90kph in the 'slow' lane, which happens to be 56mph and the optimum fuel efficiency for most modern cars.

But I walk distances in yards (22 of them to a chain -- a cricket-pitch-long -- and 10 chains to a furlong) and room sizes are in feet, and measure area in acres (one chain by one furrow-long).

And sometimes convert my car speed to furlongs per milli-fortnight, just because it's fun (a millifortnight is about 20 minutes; a microfortnight, as used on VAX VMS, is a tad over 1.2 seconds).

Oh, the the most useful units for the speed of light are a nanosecond per foot (interestingly the speed of sound at STP is around a millisecond per foot)...