Surely not fog patches; the sky was clear for hundreds of miles. A few
minutes prior I watched a freighter of perhaps 200 feet enter the English
Channel off the coast of France; his wake was clear - my point being you can
get a sense of what you're looking at. No, these were distinct small
patches of white water. Given the speed of the plane you can estimate
distance by time of course; I wish I could add to this; I can only say
again the patches of white water were about 5 to 10 miles apart, looked,
from that distance miniscule , and all lasted much less than a minute. On
another flight some years ago I saw a line that I timed for over a minute,
and that I would bet was a breaking wave- my concern here is that the sea
looked calm , such that I could tell, but if you were in a small boat where
those patches were you'd not be having fun


Someone at uk.rec.sailing suggested this:
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/PubServices/Muller_


"katy" wrote in message
...
barret bonden wrote:
Flew over Brest, Isles of Scilly, Cork, and on over the Atlantic coming
home from Spain on Wednesday . Some clouds, but no major weather; the
entrance to the English Channel looked calm, but from 32,000 feet over
the Atlantic I could see, every five or ten miles, "small" patches of
white water that endured for between 10 to 20 seconds. I've seen this
before from the air, but really don't know what to make of them, as I've
never done an Atlantic crossing in a small boat. I assume these are
random breaking waves;and if I could see them from more than 5 miles
they must be rather large; what would happen to a 40 foot boat there ?

Again , the vast majority of the ocean looked calm, and there was no
storm activity, just these scattered small patches of white water.


Sure you weren't looking at fog patches?