Forty years ago, oceanographers measured waves propagating from their creation by storms in the Antarctic to their extinction on the beaches of Alaska. At about the same time, it was shown that surface waves on deep water are unstable to modulational perturbations (the Benjamin Feir instability). So, if the ocean swell is unstable, then why were oceanographers able to observe them across the Pacifc ocean? In this talk, we re-examine both the Benjamin-Feir instability and the ocean data from the 1960s, in light of (our) recent results that show that any amount of damping stabilizes the instability.