I live on the bank of Kanawha River in Winfield, WV and keep a 1977
Thunderbird S-18 docked there.

I was crawling around on my riverbank yesterday filling in some blank spots
in my rip rap, when a tsunami hit. I turned toward the dock and saw my boat
being slammed around violently and was genuinely concerned that it might be
damaged. Sometimes when I'm out there and I see a big wake, I'll sit down on
the dock and hold the boat off with my legs, but this was so severe that I
was afraid to get near it. At the time it seemed to last forever, but my
guess is the really violent part lasted for about 60 seconds. Fortunately
nothing got broken. Except that there was now another gash in my rip rap
where the waves had rearranged some more of the rocks.

I get bounced around a lot at my dock, but I'd never seen anything quite
this bad. If there'd been any unsecured items or people in the boat, they
would have been in real danger of being thrown out. After the waves settled
down, I looked up river and saw the culprit, a big cruiser plowing along at
maximum wake speed, right up on my side of the river. That's something I've
seen a zillion times, so I really don't know what made this particular
incident so bad.

It's always the plowing cruisers. It's not strictly a size or speed thing.
Tugs pushing huge strings of barges don't rock my boat much. And we get
those long skinny offshore type boats (that are apparently propelled
entirely by noise) going by at ludicrous speed and they don't make that big
a wake. Even the cruisers when they're on plane don't seem to cause much
trouble.

I don't really know what my point was with all this, other than to bitch
about it.