Waves were generated with a paddle-type wavemaker having actively-controlled force feedback to compensate for wave reflections. The total height of the wavemaker was 0.90 m, relative to the depth 0.75 m of the quiescent water. At the opposite end of the wave tank of length 9 m, a wedge-type beach constructed of absorbent foam material provided additional attenuation of reflected waves. The motivation of the present investigation is the particularly severe loading of structures occurring in a system of incident-reflected wave systems having orbital particle trajectories of the type defined in the visualization of Van Dyke (1982). The limiting case is a pure standing wave; such wave cylinder interactions are described for a number of practical scenarios by Naudascher & Rockwell (1994). A major criterion of the present experiments was to retain the orbital character of the local wave motion past the cylinder, while attaining essentially phase-locked, spanwise coherent vortex formation. Preliminary experiments revealed that wave motion having circular orbits, i.e., particle trajectories, yielded degeneration of phase-repetitive vortex shedding and intermittent loss of quasi-dimensionality of the shed vortices, relative to waves having at least 2:1 elliptical orbits. These considerations led to generation of an orbital particle trajectory of the wave motion by adjustment of the beach. The orbital trajectory had the following characteristics: ratio of major to minor axis of 3:1; angle of inclination q of approximately 41° with respect to the horizontal; and ratio of major axis to the cylinder diameter of 2.2:1, corresponding to an effective Keulegan-Carpenter number Kc = 6.96 based on the amplitude of the major axis. These parameters were determined at a location 2.35 D to the left of the center of the cylinder, and at a constant depth of 1.57 D beneath the quiescent free-surface. At this reference location, a total of 225 instantaneous velocity vectors were spatially averaged over a square domain 0.97 D by 0.97 D, in order to obtain a single, representative instantaneous vector of the wave motion. The maximum vector magnitudes of the wave motion occurred in the first quadrant (q = 44°, |V| = 0.044 m/sec) at instants corresponding to image frame numbers (defined subsequently) N = 4 and 20, and in the third quadrant (q = 224°, |V| = 0.034 m/sec) at N = 11. At the deepest value of submergence, h/D = 1.57, distortion of the wave motion at the reference location due to presence of the cylinder is minimal, except for that portion of the wave cycle for which the vorticity moves towards the reference location. At shallower depths of submergence, especially for the surface piercing case, h/D = 0, significant distortions of the wave system occur in the near-field of the cylinder, i.e., at the reference location.