Data collected by 18 ocean bottom receivers for a seismic-line shot at both 50-m (~24 s shot interval) and 125-m (~58 s shot interval) shot spacing provide a direct field comparison of the effect of shot interval on marine wide-angle seismic data. Our results indicate that both shot spacings produce high quality refraction data in shallow water (<1000 m) on hydrophone and vertical channel data. In deeper water, the data quality of the 50-m line is adequate for the vertical channel, but it is often poor at large offsets for the hydrophone channel in comparison to the 125-m shot spacing data. A theoretical model to explain these observations provides further information useful for designing an experiment using ocean-bottom receivers. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996