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3 unusual facts about Seymour Narrows


Emil Bessels

He took part in another expedition to the northwest coast of America on the USS Saranac, but the voyage had to be interrupted after the ship was wrecked in Seymour Narrows, British Columbia.

Seymour Narrows

Seymour Narrows is notable also because the flowing current can be sufficiently turbulent to realize a Reynolds number of about 10^9, i.e. one billion, which is possibly the largest Reynolds number regularly attained in natural water channels on Earth (the current speed is about 8 m/s, the nominal depth about 100 m).

Vancouver band The Evaporators wrote a song about the event and released it on their 2004 album Ripple Rock.


SS Cardena

As if in anticipation of the indignities of her later groundings and collisions, the Cardena’s well-earned moment of glory came in the summer of 1927, when she freed the CNR liner SS Prince Rupert from the clutches of Ripple Rock in Seymour Narrows, a treacherous, three-mile tidal surge lying in Discovery Passage between Vancouver Island and Quadra Island.


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