Yes. The Gulf Stream meanders like a river, and when a bend loops far enough it pinches off into a rotating ring, exactly the way a river's meander is cut off to form an oxbow lake.
As the Gulf Stream slows past Cape Hatteras it develops large meandering bends. When a bend grows extreme and doubles back on itself, the neck pinches off and the loop separates into a self-contained rotating eddy, or ring. It is the same geometry as an oxbow lake forming on a river, just at ocean scale, which underlines that meandering is driven by the dynamics of flowing fluid rather than by riverbanks or sediment.
