Does the water in an ocean wave actually travel?

No. In an ocean wave, the shape travels and the water mostly stays. A wave is wind energy moving across the surface, and the water it passes through is just the medium that carries it.

Here is how that works. A wind wave is a surface wave raised by the wind blowing over the water. In deep water, a patch of water near the surface moves in a circle as a wave passes: forward at the top, backward at the bottom. It does not simply rise and fall, and it does not ride along with the crest. After the crest has gone by, the water ends up only slightly displaced from where it started, a small leftover called Stokes drift.

That is why a wave can go so far while the water does not. Once waves leave the area where the wind raised them, they are called swells, and they can cross thousands of kilometres. Waves raised south of Tasmania in heavy wind can travel across the Pacific and give surfers good waves in southern California.

This also separates three things people often blur together. A wave is a pattern of motion that moves through the water. An ocean current is different: it is a continuous, directed movement of the seawater itself, driven by wind, the Coriolis effect, and differences in temperature and salinity. Tides are different again. They are caused by the pull of the Moon and Sun, and they have far longer wavelengths than wind waves.

So when you watch a wave roll into a beach, you are watching energy arrive from far away. The water itself has mostly just taken part in a circle.