no, it has nothing to do with the normals. i solved the problem, it works perfectly now!

if the camera is near the water the vertices of the mesh have to be closer together than the near clipping plane distance. if this isn't the case there will be very ugly distortion because of the interpolation to the projected texture coordinates outside of the view.

i use a mesh which moves with the camera and gets denser towards the center. so if the camera gets near it will always be at this high density spot. the bump map and color map do a counter movement so it looks as if the surface didn't move...

sorry, that was me...