I probably shouldn’t have said “plenty”. There are a number but I can’t find any easy search terms that will get me a list of casualties involving loss of stability narrowed by displacement.
Near shore.
Wavelength is inversely proportional to water depth. As waves reach shallower water, it acts like a lens and bends the waves toward shore. So imagine a steady West wind (blowing east) in deep ocean as it arrives at a conical island (conical under water, like a volcano).
At the west side, the waves just get closer together, slower, and taller, and crash directly onto the shore.
At the North, they’re bent clockwise until they’re nearly at right angles to the wind. A little further East and they’ll be perpendicular.
Ship captains and windsurfers know this. Captains avoid it; windsurfers search it out!
Beside the point, but interesting IMHO, three factors dictate the behavior of wind-induced waves:
Waves increase in height at a rate proportional to wind velocity.
Max wave height is dictated by “fetch”, the distance over which the wind blows on the water. (That is, distance upwind to the opposite shore.)
Wavelength varies inversely with depth
In the open ocean swell direction is mostly controlled by the statistical prevailing wind. The wind of the moment at any given point is controlled by the local weather of the moment.
Those can easily be out of sync by a large margin. e.g. moderate swell from the east with a moderate north or south wind.
What you don’t often see in the open ocean is very large waves from one direction and simultaneously very large winds from another. You may while transiting immediately through an area of thunderstorms, which have strong but localized wind fields.