-----Original Message----- From: JCMARTIN43 [mailto:JCMARTIN43_at_aol.com] Sent: Thursday, August 27, 1998 10:05 AM To: paddlewise Subject: Re: [Paddlewise] my story is better tha Okay, I admit it. I don't know how to measure a wave. Is the "height" of a wave the vertical distance from the bottom of the trough to the top of the crest? Or is it from the mean? Or what? What's the real technical answer? <snip> Jack ************************************************************************** It is usually measured from trough to crest (but see the post about Hawaii). One thing I did a few weeks ago to keep me honest was to take a yardstick out to Lake Calhoun and measure the height from the water to my eyes, which was 28 inches in an unloaded kayak. It was the same for Dana Dickson, but only 24 inches for Linda, which might explain why waves always look bigger to her than to me. :-) Anyway, I know the waves we were paddling in on Lake Superior last week were at least 28 inches and possibly even three feet. They would have been bigger, but the fetch could not have been more than 20 miles. I don't know the wind speed, but 20 to 25 knots was forecast, and at one point we found it so difficult to progress into the wind that we thought we might have to sit it out. A problem I had on one crossing was that the skeg in my Romany jammed in a down position after I forgot to raise it before beaching. When I pushed the kayak backward off the beach with the skeg still down, it unseated the skeg enough to keep it from fitting entirely back into the slot. I knew that lowering the skeg would keep the wind from turning the kayak into the wind, but I didn't know until then that it would also keep me from turning it into the wind! Every time I did turn the kayak into the wind, it would turn back parallel to the waves. Fortunately, I was able to reseat the skeg after we ducked into a bay out of the wind. At one point when we were making our first crossing in strong wind and two- to three-foot waves, the roughest conditions Linda had ever paddled in up till then, she turned to me and shouted, "What a beautiful day!" What a woman! Chuck Holst *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:32:51 PDT