We were sitting at a park bench at Old Westbury Gardens in Westbury, NY when we noticed the water surface of a nearby pond changing its appearance from time to time depending on the absence or the presence of a light breeze.
Ripples were sometimes seen traveling across the water surface and sometimes not depending on the highly variable velocity of a gentle wind.
On a grander scale not too long ago, we noticed ripples on the surface of the Connetquot River passing by Bayard Cutting Arboretum in Great River, NY.
We'd seen days with river breezes of high vigor and other days with almost total calm, but not both on any given day. While sitting on a park bench on the river bank, winds would remain energetic or calm for the whole time and the river water would be correspondingly "choppy" as above or quite calm.
What struck me about these two observations is that when surface waves of the water were prominent and moved quite visibly in one direction or another, the water itself was either physically stationary or it was moving quite slowly in one direction or the other as evidenced by floating leaves, twigs and the like all seeming to stay put or at least not moving in the same direction as those waves.
Despite a visual first-impression, water movement did not correspond to wave movement. With these wave movements, what you seemed to see was not what you would actually get.
First impressions can be convincing, but sometimes as above, they can turn out to be in error.
Caveat observer.
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