Oooh, I didn't know that. The original assumptions make sense, but it also makes sense that there'd be a point (obviously one reached very quickly) where it all turns a corner and becomes chaos.
The blog I found of someone's trip through the Hell Gate (one that ironically the sailor caught exactly at slack tide and sailed right through without a lick of trouble) did go into the circumstances that make for a hell gate. Take the tidal flow coming into a basin through a bottleneck, and you have trouble right there. Add in two flows trying to come out, plus a number of smaller creeks/rivers trying to feed into/around the bottleneck, and you've got current smashing into each other, wrapping around, and generally turning everything into eddies and whirlpools and other madness. The really crazy part is that it's still something that obviously makes smart sailors pay very, very close attention -- and half those creeks are now dammed up or gone, along with most of the rocks. If modern sailors still go on high alert, I don't even want to think about what it must've been like to try and sail it two hundred years ago, when the situation was code red times a bazillion compared to now. Yikes.
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Date: 7 Nov 2012 06:47 am (UTC)The blog I found of someone's trip through the Hell Gate (one that ironically the sailor caught exactly at slack tide and sailed right through without a lick of trouble) did go into the circumstances that make for a hell gate. Take the tidal flow coming into a basin through a bottleneck, and you have trouble right there. Add in two flows trying to come out, plus a number of smaller creeks/rivers trying to feed into/around the bottleneck, and you've got current smashing into each other, wrapping around, and generally turning everything into eddies and whirlpools and other madness. The really crazy part is that it's still something that obviously makes smart sailors pay very, very close attention -- and half those creeks are now dammed up or gone, along with most of the rocks. If modern sailors still go on high alert, I don't even want to think about what it must've been like to try and sail it two hundred years ago, when the situation was code red times a bazillion compared to now. Yikes.