Abstract
Breakwaters, jetties, and groins have long been used in the littoral environment as port, navigation, shoreline stabilization and beach protection structures. Customarily however, the recreational benefits of structures such as these have been realized only incidentally. For example, jetties built solely to stabilize an inlet almost immediately attract surfers who exploit the break created by waves reflecting from the structure. This is the case at Sebastian Inlet, Florida, where the world renowned ‘First Peak’ was created when the north jetty was lengthened in the early 1970’s. Often when the waves elsewhere are too small to surf, one can rely on First Peak to be surfable. Also, under conditions of large, long-period swell, although the normally incident surfbreak elsewhere tends to ‘close-out’, not only is First Peak an excellent break, but sometimes a second and third surfable peak appear.
Highlights
Breakwaters, jetties, and groins have long been used in the littoral environment as port, navigation, shoreline stabilization and beach protection structures
PHYSICAL MODELING A physical model study of the north jetty at Sebastian Inlet revealed that the source of the exceptional surfbreak is the fact that waves partially reflected from the obliquely oriented jetty are trapped to the beach by refraction, and it is the interaction of the incident and refracted-reflected waves that creates the surfable break – see Figure 1
MULTI-PURPOSE OBLIQUE BREAKWATERS Other incidental recreational uses are often created by coastal structures due to the wide variety of marine life that colonize them, thereby offering snorkeling/diving opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable on a predominantly open sandy coast
Summary
Breakwaters, jetties, and groins have long been used in the littoral environment as port, navigation, shoreline stabilization and beach protection structures. PHYSICAL MODELING A physical model study of the north jetty at Sebastian Inlet revealed that the source of the exceptional surfbreak is the fact that waves partially reflected from the obliquely oriented jetty are trapped to the beach by refraction, and it is the interaction of the incident and refracted-reflected waves that creates the surfable break – see Figure 1. NUMERICAL MODELING The First Peak phenomenon has been subsequently replicated and investigated using the 2D Boussinesq wave model COULWAVE (Lynett and Liu, 2008).
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