A young white couple shared their bottle of Bollinger champagne with an ageing black man, who murmured amid the tumult, "Oh Lord, is this really happening?" A mountainous bouncer waved you into PJ's Bar and Lounge on 133rd street with the greeting: "Come in, bro, and have a drink".
But by midday, hope was nowhere to be found as the overloaded Pelican, with a failing port engine and an inexperienced crew, was slammed twice on its starboard side by the mountainous waves of a fast-moving storm; 43 passengers were lost.
The movie, which opens today in New York and New Jersey, stirs up a raging but phony-looking hurricane (aren't Pacific hurricanes known as typhoons anyway?) and a tempest at sea whose mountainous waves rival those of "The Perfect Storm" in altitude.
Few stories involve such a steady avalanche of trauma, most any single of which would rank among the top 10 of nearly every individual's worst phobias: a fiery plane crash, free fall, typhoon, mountainous waves, lost at sea, and open ocean.
Hers is a quieter version of one of those epic stories of the sea, of mountainous waves breaking over the bow, of fierce storms tearing away the mast or of days and nights spent trying to pump the boat dry.
"It is well once to behold a squall with its rising arch and coming fury, or the heavy gales of wind and mountainous waves.
The opposition these surfers face is almost as daunting as the mountainous waves here in frigid, shark-infested waters in the northern corner of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
For 400 years, starting in 1504, doughty French fishermen from Normandy and Brittany braved all the perils that the howling tempests and mountainous waves of the north Atlantic could hurl their way to fish the cornucopia of cod that swarmed the seas every spring.
Duncan smiles and waves across the court to the Rock, who is a mountainous but handsome man in a black suit and dark glasses.
Michael Chen was part of another great wave of emigrants, who came from a series of villages along the Min River in Fujian Province, a mountainous sliver of coast across the straits from Taiwan.
Eden is a mountainous district.
