Thank-you for your extensively revised manuscript. I intend to send it back to the reviewers in due course. However, first I think you still need to improve your response to their main questions: what is your aim regarding the gap(s) in existing knowledge or understanding that you intend to fill? What is new about your results. There are still some places where I think you have unnecessary text which tends to obscure your “message”. Please see details below.

Abstract.
Page 1 lines 24, 26, 28-29. These statements all refer to similar results with and without oil. So what difference does the oil make?

Introduction
Page 2 line 8. “in a heap” is not good English and very unclear in meaning.

Page 3
Line 2. “since” -> “after” or “at”
Line 16. You state “The growth rate is proportional to this curvature . .” as a fact so a reference is needed.
Line 17. “. . Hence it is expected that any modification . .”
Line 19. Delete “In this respect” (unnecessary)

Page 4 line 10. You have said a lot about what previous work has been done. But what is the gap? This is the place to say what gap in knowledge or understanding you are addressing. “complements previous . . investigations” is too vague. “open new perspectives . .” is too abstract. What are your specific objectives?

Section 3.1.1.
Page 12 line 16. “Albeit” -> “Despite”.

Page 13
Line 2. I do not like “very close to zero” – no criterion for “close”. Best to give a value.
Lines 3-4. “supports the idea presented in Mitsuyasu and Honda (1986) and discussed by Mitsuyasu (2015)”. This does not help you to claim that your work is novel.

Section 3.1.2
Page 13 line 10. Better “. . the process involves more than a decrease . .”

Page 14
Line 10. Better “. . wavenumbers are shifted by the surface current uw0 =”
Lines 12-13. Omit “As physically sound,” (unnecessary). Then better “From now on we only deal with . .”

Page 17 lines 15-16. Omit “Incidentally” and “one point we had deliberately avoided while discussing the spectra in Figure 5, i.e.”. (unnecessary). Hence “. . forces. This explains why the highest energy . .”

Section 3.2
Page 19.
Lines 5-6. Omit “Within the general purpose of a better understanding of the related air-sea interactions,” (unnecessary).
Lines 9-10. Omit “Of course a 6 m/s value would have allowed a more direct comparison with the results obtained without paddle waves (previous section). At the same time,” (unnecessary? You do have some comparison later).
Lines 11-13. Omit “Originally we had planned two full sets of parallel experiments. However, as mentioned in section 2, the strict condition of analyzing only good quality data left us with what is listed in Table 1.” (unnecessary; you did mention this in section 2).
Lines 19-20. “by a wind blowing at the reference speed of 8 m/s (experiment W08-P).” -> “by the wind.” (repetition).

Page 20
Lines 8-9. Omit “Ignoring for the time being the oily results (experiment W08-P-O),” (unnecessary).
Lines 9-10. Omit “(with a JONSWAP spectrum)” (repetition).

Page 21 lines 3-4. Better “damping (D) of wind wave energy (see for comparison Figure 6) is two or three orders of magnitude smaller . .”

Page 23 line 6. “. . similar to the result found by Mitsuyasu and Honda (1986) . .”. This does not help you to claim that your work is novel.

Section 4
Page 24 lines 17-18. This sentence is too vague – unclear meaning. Be explicit.

Page 25
Lines 2-3. “consistent with the one derived from the wind speed and similar conditions in the literature.”. This does not help you to claim that your work is novel.
Line 23. Why “However,”? This implies that the following text apparently contradicts the previous text. But I need more explanation to see the contradiction.

Section 5
Page 26 line 20. “in reference to” -> “compared with”?

Page 27
Line 11. “As mentioned in the text, we have barely touched the surface of the subject.” This does not help you to claim that your work is novel.
Line 13. Better word than “digging”? E.g. “exploring”, “studying”?

Appendix A
Page 28 line 3. “modules” -> “modulus”

Dear Authors
As you may know the original two referees were quite critical of the presentation, and unfortunately both declined to review your revised version, so I felt it necessary to find a third referee. I am pleased to tell you that their review was positive, but because it is another referee they naturally came up with some more comments beyond those of the first two. I apologise for this. Please see their report attached. On final publication all referees comments are made public along with the paper, so anyone can see whether the referee comments have been addressed. So I am sorry that I have to ask you to address these new referee comments. Neither I nor the referee are asking for too much work! I think the specific comments (with page and line numbers) should be fairly easily dealt with and represent good scientific practice. Comments 1a, b regarding relation to wider literature should help place your manuscript in that context and deserve perhaps a short paragraph each.
Yours sincerely
John Huthnance

Thank-you for your re-revised manuscript. I am now asking you to consider only a few Technical Corrections after which it should go directly to the Copernicus – OS editorial system for publication in Ocean Science (no more intervention on my part). Thank-you for publishing in Ocean Science.

Technical Corrections.

General points.
You use parentheses “(. . . .)” in many places. Presumably these contain “secondary” text. The result is often to break up the “flow” of the primary text. The detailed comments give two places but I suggest you look through and check. In English usage we tend to put secondary text after the phrase or clause which it best relates to, not in the middle.

Please spell the unit of length as “metre” if possible. European not US! And makes a distinction from a measuring instrument.

Specific comments.
Page 2 line 21. Better “. . spills (Fingas and Brown, 2017); spill drift . .”

Page 3
Lines 8-9. Better “. . characterized by strong suppression . .”
Line 11. Better “. . oil slick greatly alters the air-sea interaction”

Page 4 line 26. Better “. . Section 2 gives a general description . .”

Page 5 line 22 to page 6 line 2. Better “calibrated capacitance-type wave gauges (featuring a linear response and accuracy of 0.3 mm) collected synchronous water surface elevation data for 300 s at 50 Hz at fetches X = 8.0 m (probe G1), 12.0 m (G2), 15.5 m (G3), and 20.5 m (G4) along the tank main axis. The fetch X = 0.0 m . .”

Page 6 line 7. Better “. . 1/7 Hz were located . .”

Page 8 line 24. Please move “(Kirby and Chen, 1989; Stewart and Joy, 1974)” to later in the sentence or end of sentence.

Page 9 line 19. “alters heavily” -> “greatly alters”

Page 18 lines 2-3. Better “. . already generated waves (up to position G3). Rather, . .”

Page 25 line 27. Better “. . layer and hence . .”

Page 26
Line 24. Better “one” -> “stress”
Line 26. Better “one” -> “condition”

Page 27
Line 7. Better “level” -> “roughness”
Line 11. Omit “into”

Page 28 line 3. Better “. . width is on the order of 1 to 2 Hz; . .”

Page 29.
Line 8. Better “. . higher frequencies relative to the peak frequency . .”?
Line 10. “reducing” -> “to reduce”
Line 17. “. . studies, disappearance . .”