How long is a real ship wake?

[Rip]

Originally Posted by Ori_b

Kapitan are you sure? Several hours? How can this be, its all bubbles at the end, the disturbance is not deep and i dont think it will take them hours to surface.

Maby the waves of the wake can travel a bit, but again, several hours with the same amplitude?
Even if they do so, the span of the wave fronts will be huge, nothing you can home into something with, like a gigantic arrow head.

The sea state i believe also dictates how long will the wake be.

I'm pretty sure he is speaking of wake "residuals". The ruskies have put a lot of effort into wake research. Detectable remnants of a wake can be detected for hours, and I suspect they can make some assumption about size, speed, direction, time since it passed. I am pretty sure almost everything beyond the fact they have wake detection equipment is pretty classified so I wouldn't expect to hear much in the way of details.