Luca Pataracchia

making use of compile blocks: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-16-masterclass-compiled-sops/ [www.sidefx.com] will make things faster and save you ram. It's particularly helpful when using foreach blocks.

the instance lop allows you to use a path attributes to choose the path in the scene graph tree of you want to instance.

From the docs:
"Path Attribute

Use the value of a string attribute to select the prototype by path."

You could scatter points on a circle and ray those points onto your ocean evaluate. Then you could use an attribute promote to get the averaged normal. This is convenient because you can scale the circle up or down depending on how smooth you want it. Additionally you can smooth out you normal over time using chops