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The occasion below was measured while going south with the current only a
couple of miles off the coast, where the effects usually tend to be less.
Sometimes a counter-current is found there that has swept around the
northern side of a cape further to the south and then runs some way to the
north along the coast, at a weaker rate than the main current. For this
reason sailors - and huge ships sometimes, unfortunately - tend to hug the
coast going north.

Going south its the opposite story. The current tends to be strongest out
along the edge of the continental shelf, at about 200 metres of depth, the
old 100 fathom line. Just to round off my personal evidence for the EAC's
unpredictability, once we were sailing south for about 600 nm along the
coast, and sat out there, about 10 nm from shore, in the hope of the current
wafting us home, as there was little wind. Out of luck, the current seemed
to have gone to the same place as the wind, almost entirely missing.

> -----Original Message-----
>
> Subject: EAC
>
> > Frank Reed:
> > And just for fun: What's the most famous ocean current? Three  years
> > ago, it was probably the Gulf Stream, but that title now almost > >
certainly  goes to its down-under counterpart, the East Australian Current
or EAC. > > Thanks  to a
> > computer-generated turtle and a couple of little fish in a Disney movie,
> > this ocean current's name has become known to hundreds of millions of
> > people worldwide.
>
> Peter Fogg:
> Don't know about famous, but unpredictable and strong it can be. It is
> reputed to run at between 2 and 4 knots. I've measured its effect as about
> 4 knots over a run of 20 nm.

   

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