So do you guys still want to do the bedford experiment over the oceans? Or has anyone else got other ideas?
Doing the experiment over the ocean, preferably a calm ocean, is perfectly acceptable. Doing it on a calm lake is even better. What is not acceptable is doing it on a stretch of just 6 miles. The error caused by refraction is enough to give false results in particularly bad conditions. But this error does not increase significantly when doing the experiment on a longer stretch, while the measured height increases almost exponentially with the increase of length.
Also, the size of the waves is not as important when you do the experiment in, say, 20 or 25 kilometers. But the size of the observed phenomenon increases from about a meter or two to several meters.
In fact, I have been in a calm ocean, several miles off the coast, and the size of the waves was of only a few centimeters. The problem with waves is totally manageable.