A disadvantage of the SPRAY SKIRT AS TETHER idea is that you might rip your skirt or damage it's elastic just when you really need a good spray skirt. It seems to me that TOWING FROM A POINT UNDER THE KAYAK would certainly tangle, or even break, the rudder when the towed boat rose higher than the tow boat due to wave action. " There is nothing comparable to this amount of energy (the falling climber) in a yakker-paddle boat system under the likely scenarios sea kayakers would encounter in water (excluding big surf)." TRUE, I admit that my extreme case scenario would involve big surf, and in big surf you would want to disconnect your personal tether. A lot of people disconnect paddle-to-boat tethers in surf also, fearing entanglement. It occurs to me that it is not that unlikely that a solo paddler might be still connected to their boat by a personal tether when caught by a surprise boomer. In this sort of instant surf a lot of force could act on the tether (I know it sounds far fetched, but I am continually surprised by the power of hydraulics). "If you used a modern climbing rope as part of the leash system, it would perform similarly to help reduce the peak forces." This is NOT strictly true. The stretch in a climbing rope is proportionate to the length of the rope, so the very short length that I imagine would be appropriate (to reduce chance of tangles) in the tether would not stretch anywhere near as much as the length of rope involved in a typical belay setup. A smaller diameter nylon rope tether might be called for to make a shock absorbing tether. "Nick, I suspect "thousands of pounds of force" is probably way too high an estimate even for the force generated in a worst-case "over the falls" scenario for a surf kayaker" You might be right. But I based my wild estimate on the MOMENTARY forces assuming that the boat and boater were moving in opposite directions. I am a blacksmith, and in using both hand and power hammers I recieve continual reminders of the way forces can spike to very high levels when objects of even relatively low mass change direction in an instant. You are right when you point out that the belay anchor (and my Anvil) are the proverbial immovable object, whereas the kayaker in water can be moved. Nevertheless, the momentum of a 200 pound kayaker moving the other way from the kayak will cause a spike in the forces involved at the moment the tether becomes taught. If this spike multiplied the forces involved, momentarily, to ten times the mass of the kayaker then you have "thousands" of pounds. I am not a physicist, so my estimate is just a wild guess, but I do know that a runaway kayak will hit you pretty hard. Also, I was postulating a short tether, without the stretch of a longer length of climbing rope, and without the dynamic belay (when the rope slides through the belay device). The stretchy rope and the dynamic belay GREATLY reduce the spike in forces when the rope comes taught in a leader fall, this is one of the reasons I thought it might not be too far fetched to compare the forces involved (OK OK, a short leader fall). "I believe most of us are concerned with the forces generated if we capsize in a tide rip or in gnarly wind waves. Under these conditions, the yakker-paddle-boat system will not generate anything like the forces in a climbing rope in a leader fall." Yes, of course, and an argument might be made to use a fairly slender Nylon line for maximum stretchiness, but not so thin it would break under momentary loads of a couple thousand pounds. Nick Lyle *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
In a message dated 9/15/99 10:05:44 AM Pacific Daylight Time, nickjean_at_speakeasy.org writes: << A disadvantage of the SPRAY SKIRT AS TETHER idea is that you might rip your skirt or damage it's elastic just when you really need a good spray skirt.>> If you experience the types of forces you are talking about in your other thread. I haven't and I probably wouldn't use the tether in anything which could possibly generate such forces. But you make a good point. I have considered the idea of having a belt around my body, with a strap running through the grab loop to the side-release buckle. I'm just not sure it isn't overkill. << It seems to me that TOWING FROM A POINT UNDER THE KAYAK would certainly tangle, or even break, the rudder when the towed boat rose higher than the tow boat due to wave action.>> Rudder??? Excuse me? :^) <<Yes, of course, and an argument might be made to use a fairly slender Nylon line for maximum stretchiness, but not so thin it would break under momentary loads of a couple thousand pounds.>> Or possibly a bunji shock-absorber like we use in tow systems? Happy Paddling, Harold *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
<< A disadvantage of the SPRAY SKIRT AS TETHER idea is that you might rip your skirt or damage it's elastic just when you really need a good spray skirt.>> "If you experience the types of forces you are talking about in your other thread. I haven't and I probably wouldn't use the tether in anything which could possibly generate such forces. But you make a good point. I have considered the idea of having a belt around my body, with a strap running through the grab loop to the side-release buckle. I'm just not sure it isn't overkill." I do like the simplicity of your spray skirt idea. The more lines and tethers we come up with, the more likely we are to become tangled. I would have thought that all this worry about tethers was exagerated, except that someone appears to have drowned becaues of becoming tangled in a tether while fishing from a kayak in the San Juans this summer. A simple large, easy to operate carabiner clipping the skirt loop to a short tether does seem to be nice and simple. The more I think about it the better I like it. Nick Lyle *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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