One of the responses to high-visibility color schemes mentioned painting the hull white, as it shows up with good contrast against water, and the top a red-yellow (I think it was yellow) combination. The US Coast Guard commissioned a study on visibility from a University researcher, which was done with jet-ski's, as they were small (and probably fun to play with during the study!). They tried strobes, and colors and found that international orange (used to be day-glo) was best, with bright yellow and, I think, robin's egg blue next best, followed by red. Apparently robin's egg blue is not found very frequently in nature and shows up well against ocean blue/grey/green. One thing to be considered about white is that with any froth/white cap/agitated surface state, the boat becomes another line of white amongst thousands. Also worth considering is that the high-visibility issue serves two purposes - avoidance when you're paddling in a busy area, and also assisting rescues by making the hull as visible as possible when you're in trouble. For this reason I felt the bottom of the boat should be as visible as the top, as there's a chance if I needed rescue I might be clinging to my upturned boat. My choice was the brightest yellow gel-coat I could find, top and bottom. As pointed out by Snaggletooth it does start to look ragged after a few years of being dragged over rocks and shells, but it's still very visible. One other technique I've read was a kayaker who painted his rudder international orange - when it was in the water it didn't do much good, but this paddler used a rudder only part of the time, and when it was up on deck it was apparently the first thing people saw. Alan Gurevich/Seattle *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Mar 13 2000 - 10:43:24 PST
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