Re: [Paddlewise] bracing and power

 Pam in Washington State wrote:



>>>>>Dan Henderson at Cascade Canoe and Kayak seems to be THE person doing
research on the efficiency of different paddling styles, at least in the
Seattle area. He is the one you should contact about these questions.<<<<<<

I've talked to and encouraged Dan many times in the past five years or so
about doing this type of research and about building a force measuring paddle
that can be hooked up to a computer at the same time as a knotmeter. I haven't
talked to Dan real recently though, so I don't know how far in this direction
he has gotten. Back in the 1980's, I worked on how this kind of paddle could
work to compare kayaks (working with John Dowd and John Dawson for Sea Kayaker
kayak tests) and thought might also be helpful in training paddlers to make
more efficient paddle strokes. Sea Kayaker got experimenter rates from the
test tank facility at UBC in Vancouver, BC and used tank tests instead
(althought the articles generated still cost them five times as much as a
normal article using the same space). They tank tested a couple of times at
first (spread over three issues) and then later used mathematical calculations
(regression analysis--much cheaper than tank tests) that I was frustrated with
because beyond the calculated friction from wetted surface, it overemphasized
length and looked at little other parameters that were important to the
residual resistance (the resistances due to other than simple friction). I
improved on this using the Taylor Standard Series I was familiar with from
doing research on drag when first designing sea kayaks back in 1979 and 1980.

I always wanted to see such a paddle built, but became much busier running our
kayak business and never got to experimenting with actually trying to make a
paddle fitted with strain guages and (I forget the name--some kind of
accellerometer) devices to see the rotation and angles of the paddle at the
same time along with a knotmeter. I looked into the equipment that would be
needed though a few different times. In the mid 1980's, the analog/digital
converters and the computers were separate devices and much less sophisticated
and larger than they later became. Since then I have talked to several others
who were interested in taking this kind of thing on and have tried to
encourage them to do so, and volunteered to help out. My best bet at the
present is Dan Henderson. A decade or more ago I asked Greg Barton if the
racing association was doing, or had already done, this sort of thing, hoping
to not be re-inventing the wheel as it were. As far as I know, so far, the
electronic paddle is yet to exist. Greg said they did video studies to improve
performance but didn't have an electonic paddle that he knew about (this was
probably at least a decade or more ago when I asked him about it, so maybe it
has been done since and I haven't heard about it--national racing associations
tend to work in secret to get an edge in future competitions). I think such a
paddle could answer a lot of questions and could be very useful for
instructors as well. It might even be rigged up to provide direct feedback to
the paddler so they could learn to feel when their stroke was optimized.
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