Margot wrote: >It looks as if there could have been oscillation. Hobie Cat >has a video of a Mirage in a tug of war against a double at >http://www.hobiecat.com/kayaking/miragedrive.html, G'Day Margot, Thanks for that excellent link. Looks as if its the same boat described by Matt. The video's seem to provide questions for most of the explanations advanced so far. - The fins look to be the same size as the paddle blades so where does gearing come into play? - When Greg Barton and Oscar Chalupsky try to pull the flippered boat they use an unsynchronised stroke? So is speed of stroke really a workable strategy? - There is a huge amount of spray (turbulence?) at the paddle blades and no visible evidence of any around the flippered boat, better flipper efficiency perhaps? - As you say the two boats oscillate back and forth during the contest, at least when Greg is paddling by himself, so maybe the need to continuously accelerate the paddled boat is part of the problem? A puzzle is Nick Schade's observation that in a race the flipper operated boat simply doesn't perform. Is it just a question of flipper size and given a smaller unit a flippered boat would out perform the paddled boat? The advertising blurb claims these boats can reach hull speed. This might indicate that the boat in the video has smaller flippers than the one Nick saw or that the boat in the tug of war had larger flippers than the video shows? Perhaps flippers are just more efficient than paddles? I know most finned fish I try to catch are faster than my kayak. I'm also sure legs are more efficient than torsos at fairly high speed work. That leads me to yet another question - How do legs contribute when top kayakers (and even average kayakers like myself) pump them to go faster? All the best, PeterO *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Sep 06 2004 - 03:02:35 PDT
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