Actually I saw a special once on the physics of waves (or maybe it was an article in Discovery magazine back when it was a decent magazine, unsure...) It could get a little nasty.
Basically surf "breaks" because the bottom of the wave starts dragging on the ocean floor, which makes it top-heavy. Note that the "bottom" of the wave is a lot deeper than the trough. When the friction becomes great enough, it unbalances and circular currents that occur in waves in pseudo-cylinders perpendicular to the direction of travel cause it to curl. Other than that all you would need is a normal oscillating sine wave to draw your ocean before the breaker point. There is probably a paper somewhere on the math involved as I've seen a few models of it, you might want to see if it's posted somewhere.
As for camera angles, if you can get the wave math to work, moving a camera around should be a breeze.

g'luck, you'll need it *smile*
-fel