Here is the picture I posted.
What are you talking about? You didn't zoom in on the trees at all. This picture shows absolutely nothing of any scientific value. Take a Nikon P900 or P1000, zoom in on the trees as close as you can get, and then get back to us.
From this distance, without zooming, ABSOLUTELY a 5-foot wave could obscure 15 feet of trees. It's simple perspective, man. If the waves are closer to you, they are BIGGER in your line of site than the trees many miles away. Something 5 feet tall that's within 100 yards of you is going to be bigger than something that's 100 feet tall and several miles away. You need to actually zoom in on the target.
For this to be of any scientific value, you need to docuмent 1) where you are, 2) how far away the trees are, 3) what the conditions are (wave heights, atmospheric conditions), 4) what camera you're using and at what zoom level. That's just to get the data. But you need to zoom in on those trees. Due to perspective, things start to converge with the horizon. I've seen dozens of views just like that that when you zoom in on them, the bottom starts to reappear and it was just an optical thing due to perspective, the limits of our vision (in the case of your camera's low zoom level), etc.