Debate is an important part of scientific progress, serving both to clarify issues and to sift erroneous ideas before they have a chance to take root. Coastal Engineering is to be commended for allowing not only Discussions and Replies, but also Responses and Retorts. However, apart from majoring on minors, the initial discussion and now response of Haller and Catalán (2008) add very little except their own personal opinions, without any scientific backup whatsoever. Granted, I made a mistake in columns 4 and 6 of Table 3 (Le Roux, 2007a), where the values of H b should decrease with an increase in the H o / L o ratio according to Sakai and Battjes (1980) and Komar and Gaughan (1973). The fundamental issue addressed in my paper, nevertheless, was not the work of previous authors, but a new method to derive the breaker depth and height for different wave conditions and sea floor slopes. On this aspect Haller and Catalán (2008) fail to make any meaningful contribution.
Haller and Catalán (2008) once more accuse me of inconsistency and wrong methodology in comparing my model with other authors, this time with an example (see their Fig. 1). In columns 2-8, I consistently used d b as obtained from both my shoaling trajectory and breaking criterion together with the H b /d b ratios of the original authors. Haller and Catalán advocate using only my shoaling trajectory with the different breaking criteria, but both their resultant d b and H b values differ from mine. In the case of Collins (1970), for example, they argue that the calculated breaker height of 0.14 m is not meaningful since the conditions d b = 0.2 m and H b = 0.14 m do not exist along my shoaling trajectory for the given wave condition. One can similarly argue that their breaking depth, does not coincide with my breaking criterion for the given wave condition, so this is simply a matter of personal choice. The authors give no hard facts as to why their choice of using my shoaling trajectory (based on the theoretical model of Cokelet, 1977) should be better than my breaking criterion (based on experimental data reported in the Shore Protection Manual, 1984).
The use of L o = gT w 2 /2π for developing waves in my original paper was due to the generally held belief that this equation is also valid in Coastal Engineering 55 (2008) 823-824