I realize we got a bit off the original topic for practical suggestions for paddling upstream. Admittedly, I enjoyed stirring the pot a bit. The amazon dilemma was something that worked my mind a bit and even my paddle a few times. That being said there is still a lot to think about. I actually find myself agreeing with what steve says about poling and making headway. I have limited experience poling. It mostly resulted from bruised knees in the bottom of an alumicraft canoe 30 years ago but at least the bow was light when I did it. I have very limited experience attaining. Quite frankly, it looks like a lot of work and the few times I tried it I found it exhausting. Both remind me of a salmon jumping up stream. Pushing off hard with the stern or tail, the nose jumping clear of the water to the path of least resistance. Likewise, I regularly see SUP boarders, legs spread apart, on the back of their boards, front edge up, as they paddle upstream. It doesn’t look easy!
But does that jive with my paddling experiences? There’s not a doubt in my mind that its easier to set an upstream ferry angle from the stern of the boat, the part of the boat that is encountering the least resitance from the current. Like wise when setting a downstream ferry angle its much easier from the bow. In both instance the loose end of the boat is the one meeting the least resitance (current). I’m not sure what you mean by leverage being the factor here. In my mind the reason why its difficult is that the current itself prevents the adjustment. We encounter a similiar dilemma rafting. Put a couple of three hundred pounders up front and the problem isn’t going straight. Its getting the boat to turn. Rafts are great example because you eliminate boat lean in the equation and you have extreme currents. Leaning usually equates to flipping. A heavy raft equates to a difficult boat spin and adjust its like paddling a giant slug.
For a brief period of time I got interested in how ferry angles could be set in canoes. So I actually did do some bow solo paddling in current. More often than not if the current was significant it would catch the light tail end and spin the boat. Thus I would end up facing upstream, bow first, the exact position that I saw the amazon indians in, an utter failure in terms of setting a ferry angle. Yet stable, in alignment with the current but now facing upstream instead of downstream.
In poling, attaining and
SUPs i think “loose” is a good thing. I’m not sure it is if your having trouble paddling straight.
A far less controversial idea would have been to suggest paddling from the middle of the boat. You even the trim, minimize the turning effects of the strokes because you’re away from the ends and I’m pretty sure newbies don’t paddle to swan lake with the canoe tipped up on edge. But if I’d done that I wouldn’t have gotten to see photos of naked amazon women. No fun in that!
My buddy Frank puts small boulders in the front of his canoe, he likes the way it rides in whitewater. Oops I think that’s a whole different topic!
Do you treat your car’s service manager
this way? I read through that twice and couldn’t get what you want to know.
Ferry angles must be set and then maintained. Upstream end light is almost always necessary. One may need to tilt the boat to present the bottom to the current.
With the right speed, tilt, and angle, some canoes and kayaks will seem to fly. But pointy ended, round bottomed craft won’t, and need a ferry angle only a little different from the current.
Poling is fairly easy when one works with the current. Some hulls are better than others. Ferrying is not much different from when one paddles, except that usually the canoe’s axis must be kept closer to the current direction.
what I want to know
how is it possible that a weighted bow in upstream current will result in an inability to go straight? I still don’t get that. Its asserted that weight in the bow creates resistance and heightens turning. I find it difficult to turn the boat in that scenario.
Ponder how a weather vane works
… It will come to you eventually
the sides are equally weighted
on a weather vane. It is the surface area on each end that is different. What I’m having trouble imagining is a weather vane that is weighted on one end, with some leeway to also move up and down, thus in and out of the wind. What I advocated previously was weighting one end of the weather vane to prevent it from turning.
And likewise it is the surface area …
... on your end-weighted canoe that differs. Or maybe I should say the "below the surface" area. The weight, per se, is not the cause of the turning or not turning. The causes are the differential surface area and the flow across it.
I think it depends
on what you are trying to do.
I have a number of whitewater canoes and I set them up so that they are trimmed neutrally when I am kneeling with my trunk upright. If I lean back a bit they are bow light and if I lean forward they are somewhat bow heavy.
I am not sure that doing an upstream attainment and executing an upstream ferry where one is not trying to move upstream will have the same optimal technique.
I find that when trying to attain upstream, I virtually always have my weight forward but I think it is more a matter of trying to take efficient strokes with the paddle planted as far forward as possible to keep the stroke well forward of my hip.
I agree with the bit about always correcting a ferry angle from the downstream end of the boat. That would be the stern for an upstream ferry and the bow for a back ferry. When the upstream end of the boat is starting to get blown downstream by the current (for example when exiting an eddy into strong current on either a forward ferry or a back ferry) it is much easier to utilize a stroke on the downstream end that works with the current to move that end of the boat downstream than it is to try horsing the upstream end of the boat against the current.
But executing a simple ferry across relatively uniform current where one is not trying to make upstream progress is a little different than attaining. In that situation once the angle is set it is relatively easy to keep your weight back (on a forward ferry) and slide across the current on a static draw or pry.
Bow surfing a boat is somewhat analogous to correcting ferry angle on an upstream ferry. In that case, once I am on the wave I usually keep my weight well back, but that is partly to keep the bow stem from digging in. Again, all angle correction is from the stern (downstream) end.
It depends partly on whether your boat
is at current speed, or has just gotten out into the current from an eddy or quieter water.
At current speed, it won’t matter if your bow is heavier. Or your stern is heavier. At current speed, the current does not try to turn your boat. But when you just get out in the current, it will push on all boat surfaces, but it will push harder on the end of the boat that is deeper, that is loaded more. By having your bow loaded less than your stern, there is some tendency for the boat to stay in line by weather-vaning.
When I take a more radical ferry angle, but don’t do what I should to maintain it, the current rushing past the boat may cause it to weather vane and point more upstream rather than more across the current the way I intended.
YES
This is the topic I often get on my soap box about, and is the crux of what's illustrated in the "thought problem" I presented in the earlier thread. In short ferries across a narrow paths of swift water, the boat's inertia is a key factor affecting how it interacts with the water, since the current is in the process of accelerating the boat. But when simply traveling in a broad uniform current, inertia is NOT a factor (in regards to current), and the boat moves through the water by paddle power exactly the same as when on a lake. The actual direction of travel will be affected by drift, but the boat and paddler only perceive the normal process of paddling forward through the water, even if that water happens to be moving.
We all experience this at all times. The ground beneath our feet is moving several hundred miles per hour from west to east. If we were just dropped from a stationary point in space onto the spinning earth, we'd experience the moving ground the same way as a boat experiences current when suddenly pushed into that current from an eddy (okay, the speed difference would be a whole lot greater, so the process would be much more violent, but you get the idea). But once our inertia were overcome and we were done rolling along the ground, we could stand up and walk around and not even realize that the ground beneath our feet were still moving as before. What we experience as we walk around on the surface of the earth, in whichever direction we please (except that since our only frame of reference is the ground we stand on, we do not ever need to take into account our "drift" due to the movement of that ground), is no different than what a boat experiences when traveling in a broad, steady current. It too can travel in any direction in that situation with no adjustments. The only difference is that when in a boat, we DO need to account for the movement of water in choosing our heading since our destination is not relative to the water itself.
It's only the sudden changes in current that matter, as when initiating a ferry, or when encountering turbulence. Strictly in terms of how the hull interacts with water, "going upstream" in a broad river is just like lake paddling.
this is a lot to process
I’m not sure I have the whole picture in my mind. There are so many elements to consider- the weight in the boat and subsequent displacement, trim- the location of the weight and its effect on ends of the boat, your speed vs the speed of the current, the effectiveness of the strokes in relation to the boat itself and the features you’re paddling through.
Thinking about paddling is much harder than actually paddling!
It is important to note
That when you are surfing a wave on the river or executing a ferry in current where you are not moving downstream, your boat is “moving faster than the current” even though it may appear to be stationary relative to the river banks.
“your speed vs speed of the current”
For plain upstream paddling, you need not consider your actual speed compared to that of the current. All that matters in terms of boat control is the speed that the boat moves through the water that supports it. The boat reacts to water streaming by the hull, but not to anything else.
I'll modify that first statement, in that of course it is important what your speed through the water is, relative to that of the current, because that's what determines whether you hold your position or make progress while moving upstream. But that is not related to actual boat control. You could be in perfect control of your boat as you paddled at 4 mph into a 10-mph current, and if it were nighttime and you couldn't see the river banks going by "the wrong way", you'd think you were getting along just fine, and the boat would feel perfectly normal. The same would be true going downstream too, if you couldn't see anything around you. All you boat "knows" is how fast it moves through the water. As long as the flow is even and uniform, the boat cares not one bit which way the water that supports it might be moving, because it's along for the ride, just as we are along for the ride at hundreds of mile per hour on the ground we stand on at this very moment.
Thinking harder than paddling…
…and writing about it (in a way that makes sense to others) is harder than thinking it. But it all burns much less gas than actually going out and doing it. 
Not much I can add that I didn’t post on the other thread. If you review the Karen Knight video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMyTTjKV-1U&feature=related
You can see (staring about 2:20) that the boat does not naturally track without her corrective input. It’s relatively easy for her to control the direction from her position in the bow, because the boat’s water line is severely shortened and she has easy reach to where the leverage advantage is at the time (the front of the boat).
Right at 2:25, you can see the boat is trying to yaw to the right, but she arrests that movement with one easy stroke - then at 2:30 she swings the boat around with just as little effort. There isn’t any tracking advantage with the boat trimmed this way - she’s just in the right place to control it easily. If she had supernaturally long arms and stayed in the middle of the boat with enough sacks of potatoes in the bow to lift the rest of the boat out of the water, she could probably do the very same move. Restrict her to her natural reach from the middle though, and bow control would take much more effort.
And that doesn’t even address the fact that hull efficiency suffers with the boat out of trim.
Question for you to ponder…Why is it that many of the most modern general-purpose canoe designs have slight rocker in the bow and less or none in the rear - but you never see one designed the opposite way. It isn’t because inexperienced paddlers have trouble making a canoe turn…
What g2d said about weather-vaning is absolutely correct. If I stand far enough back in the downstream end of my canoe and simply hold my position in the current with the pole directly behind the stern, the boat will point itself directly into the oncoming current. That’s assuming the rest of the boat is empty so the bow is out of the water.
Plain upstream paddling?
I suppose on an ideal river with no bends or obstructions and absolutely laminar flow the speed of the boat relative to the current would make no difference in handling. But that is a situation that seldom exists, at least on the rivers I paddle.
Water reacting off of obstructions either extending above or lying beneath the surface, or off the banks at any sort of bend is always going to cause alterations in the direction of the current, and current flow in a river is often not aligned with the banks.
Whenever there is current striking the boat at any sort of angle to its long axis there will be a vector of force that moves the boat laterally relative to the current. Obviously that is how ferries work. The greater the speed of the water relative to the boat, or the larger the angle of the current to the long axis of the boat the stronger the vector of lateral force and the more dramatic the effect on the boat.
That is easy to appreciate when bow surfing a wave. Here the boat is stationary relative to the river bottom but water is rushing past, under, and around the boat. And even when perfectly aligned with the current on the most uniform glassy wave it is unusual to be able to sit on it for very long with no paddle input. Slight surges and variations in the current will soon cause some yawing of the boat which becomes exponentially greater unless some immediate paddle input (and/or edge control) corrects for it.
Boat reactions
The boat does react to something else though - applied leverage and thrust. We touched on this a little in the other thread, but didn’t really get anywhere with it. What the thrust comes from isn’t relevant to what the boat does in the water. But combine that with varying degrees of leverage, and it will do different things for as long as the force is applied and a little after if we’re lucky. That’s part of the reason that poling differs from paddling - different leverage.
I think this is why the Amazon paddlers we talked about are sitting in the bow. I’m thinking that the leverage needed to control direction from there is less for the hull shapes they use and speed isn’t so much an issue - along with some other possible practical reasons having nothing to do with boat/current dynamics.
The crocs don’t attack the head end?
That would be enough reason for me.
Seriously!
Maybe it’s harder for crocs to sneak-attack from behind with that end of the boat up out of the water??
More seriously
This paddler appears to be fishing with a hand-line. If I were using a hand-line, I’d want to be sitting the same way in that boat.
http://www.naturegraphics.net/pb8143w%20Fisherman%20in%20canoe.jpg
I finally found a book that answers all
here it is
http://www.amazon.com/Paddling-Upstream-ebook/dp/B007ZHEEIA#_
Some replies
"I suppose on an ideal river with no bends or obstructions and absolutely laminar flow the speed of the boat relative to the current would make no difference in handling. But that is a situation that seldom exists, at least on the rivers I paddle."
I brought this up because the original poster started this topic strictly in terms of addressing upstream travel. I have said repeatedly that turbulence in the form of small (or large), localized variations in speed and direction that the water moves certainly DO affect the boat and how it is controlled, and that some of these have a more pronounced effect when traveling upstream. But in smooth water, like in the middle of a broad river, all the boat cares about is that it is moving through the water in response to the paddle. If that whole sheet of water happens to be moving, and the boat with it, it makes no difference which direction the boat moves within that water. The turbulence issue is something else entirely. In fact, in a broad river, the kind of turbulence you see is boils rising to the surface and spreading in random directions. These can often be felt when the boat hits them, but because they have no organized direction and because they are moving WITH the current as they occur, which direction you are going when you encounter them is irrelevant.
I have swum out into the middle of the Wisconsin River on a dark night, and treaded water while drifting downstream (I've done that at places where I know the river well, and knew that I'd have a huge "safe landing zone" downstream). Once into water over my head, there was NO sensation of movement at all, and invariably, my first contact with the river bottom would scare the crap out of me because it was just like getting bumped hard by an enormous fish. When coasting along like that, there's no way to tell which way the water is flowing, or even that it is flowing at all! When you finally touch the bottom after being out there a few minutes, it feels like the bottom is what is moving, rather than the water that supports you. Same thing happens if you are swimming, rather than treading water (and when swimming in the dark you can't tell which was the current is moving either). The reason that a boat moves in the same manner on a broad sheet of moving water regardless of its direction is exactly the same.
"Water reacting off of obstructions either extending above or lying beneath the surface, or off the banks at any sort of bend is always going to cause alterations in the direction of the current, and current flow in a river is often not aligned with the banks."
Yes. I said this many times, but that's not related to whole-sheet flow as in the open part of a giant river, such as going upstream versus any other direction on a huge body of moving water like the Amazon.
"Whenever there is current striking the boat at any sort of angle to its long axis there will be a vector of force that moves the boat laterally relative to the current. Obviously that is how ferries work. The greater the speed of the water relative to the boat, or the larger the angle of the current to the long axis of the boat the stronger the vector of lateral force and the more dramatic the effect on the boat."
Yes, that happens when encountering a little blast of turbulence from a new direction (wish I didn't have to repeat this), and regarding ferries, that only happens during the time during which the inertia of the boat tends to keep it in place rather than allow it to drift (see g2d's post above), as at the beginning of a "jet ferry" in the short space of time after the boat suddenly encounters the faster flow. Once that inertia is overcome, and the boat is stationary RELATIVE to the rapidly-moving water that supports it, you are simply paddling in a direction which counteracts the overall drift (as in the example above about a person being placed from a stationary position on the surface of the earth. Even more similar to ferrying, you could drop a toy car at an angle onto a conveyor belt and observe a "jet ferry" in action, UNTIL the car's inertia were overcome and it simply moved along with the belt, at which point it would need a motor to continue the ferry, just like a paddler must supply forward power to maintain a ferry after the initial "jetting phase" has run out of steam). On a wide-open river, the boat has been in the current for a while and there is no longer any inertia supplying force to hold the boat at a velocity that's different from that of the current, so water "hitting one side of the boat" no longer happens. All you can do is paddle at an appropriate angle to the current while water streams along the sides of the boat the same as in any other straight-ahead paddling situation. THIS is why that favorite example used in physics classes, where a boat can drive circles around a floating buoy and NO affect of current can be observed from within the boat itself actually works. A "jet ferry" that occurs when suddenly placing the boat into a stream of faster water is an entirely different situation, not applicable at all to broad-sheet flow.
Also in regard to ferries, the reason you have to lean is BECAUSE the boat is being accelerated. If you didn't lean, you'd topple for the same reason as you would on dry land if someone pulled a rug out from under you. Yet, if you counteracted the person's yank on the rug by leaning, you'd stay on your feet. Understanding the reason for boat-lean when initiating a ferry (or eddy-out) is key to understanding the forces acting on the boat at that moment, and thus the way it accelerates (just to be clear, remember that acceleration is any change in velocity (and this always the result of an external force), and velocity consists of both speed AND direction of movement).
"That is easy to appreciate when bow surfing a wave. Here the boat is stationary relative to the river bottom but water is rushing past, under, and around the boat. And even when perfectly aligned with the current on the most uniform glassy wave it is unusual to be able to sit on it for very long with no paddle input. Slight surges and variations in the current will soon cause some yawing of the boat which becomes exponentially greater unless some immediate paddle input (and/or edge control) corrects for it."
No argument at all from me about this either. One thing that's going on there to make things tricky is that the boat's speed through the water that supports it is usually very fast, much faster than we usually paddle, so tiny changes in flow direction will really knock it off course more than would occur when simply paddling upstream at a more normal speed. Tow your boat on a lake at that same through-the-water speed as you experience when surfing, and find a way to suddenly change the heading of the boat (to provide the same hull-water interaction which occurs due to those sudden minor variations in current direction) and you would feel the same kind of jolting action and have the same need for sudden steering corrections. I actually did that once. PJC and I were taking a "wounded comrade" to a town with a hospital, and got a tow from game wardens with a motorboat. It was only safe to tow us at a fairly slow speed (slow by motorboat standards, but two or three times faster than we could have traveled under paddle power), but every glitch in the boat's heading or tiny speck of turbulence in the water (we stayed just outside of the motor's turbulence, in "clean water") "tried" to knock us drastically off our heading. I was in the stern and applied almost constant rudder corrections to keep us from careening off course (which would have resulted in rolling right over) at unpredictable moments. It made no difference that we were going upstream. All that mattered was that water was streaming by the hull much faster than that which is normally experienced. I've felt the same thing when surfing the guide-boat at 9 to 12 mph on the leading faces of large waves on our local lake. Things get squirrelly in a hurry at such speeds, and the need to apply correction in response is nearly constant.