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The shoaling of horizontally propagating internal waves may represent an important source of mixing and transport in estuaries and coastal seas. Including such effects in numerical models demands improvements in the understanding of several aspects of the energetics, especially those relating to turbulence generation, and observations are needed to build this understanding. To address some of these issues in the estuarine context, we undertook an intensive field program for 10 days in the summer of 2008 in the St. Lawrence Estuary. The sampling involved shore‐based photogrammetry, ship‐based surveys, and an array of moorings in the shoaling region that held both conventional and turbulence‐resolving sensors. The measurements shed light on many aspects of the wave shoaling process. Wave arrivals were generally phase‐locked with the M₂ tide, providing hints about far‐field forcing. In the deeper …