[Paddlewise] Turning a kayak

This has been a fascinating discussion for me to follow.  I learned to kayak 
in the days when whitewater slalom boats had to be leaned to make them turn 
because they didn't have flat bottoms or ends.  We were always taught to 
lean away from the turn and the explanations generally had to do with 
resistance on the sides.  But I never paid much attention to the reasons, I 
just did what worked.  Sometimes I did what didn't work, but maybe that's 
why I lost so many races?

Anyway, the reason I'm rambling is to say that boat shape and momentum might 
not be all there is to this.  I have no understanding at all of physics, but 
I'm pretty sure I understand what my sea kayak is doing when I turn.  Hope 
this makes sense.

If I want to turn the boat to the right, it will turn right with less effort 
if it has just started to turn left.  In other words, if the boat has just 
begun to drift into a left turn, the effort of the left forward sweep to 
turn it to the right is less than if the boat was going straight ahead.

Looking back at my side and stern wakes while this is happening, I see, or 
maybe imagine, that the boat's wakes when it has started to turn  are 
perturbed whereas they are quite regular when the boat is going straight.  
Does this agitation of the wake somehow lower the water's resistance to 
allowing the boat to move through it or to turn?  Or is some other factor 
involved?  Such as my normal detachment from reality?

Every now and then, I feel this effect even more in my whitewater boat when 
surfing a standing wave on the river.  If the angle of the wave is such that 
I'm really fighting to turn back to where I want to be, I'll turn just a 
hair the wrong way and punch back to the angle I want.  It sometimes seems 
to work better than just fighting the angle directly.

Jim Tibensky

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