When seagulls follow the trawler: bow waves

I was watching this fishing boat at Silloth and ended up thinking about the way that bow waves form at the front. The boat was moving at a steady speed on a reasonably calm sea. It was almost low tide so the current would have been small so it wouldn't be unreasonable to think of the sea water as stationary with a moving boat on it. So the front of the boat pushes on the water. Molecules in water are close together. You can't compress water very much. So the large mass of water in front of the boat (in tis case all the way to Ireland) gets in the way of the water that is being pushed forward by the boat. Hence the water mounts up. They will gain gravitational potential energy and will then try to lose that by falling. I think this will be why the wave them spreads out.