those darker colors get hot
to the touch during summer down south , it would be nice if the decks were a cooler color and the hull brighter to cut down on glare.my necky dolphin is camoed out with adhesive leaves over a gray background and my spike is bright yellow, boats tend to not see you until close with both colors. blade color seems to be the more important factor.
My CD Sirocco . . .
(sorry, I just love writing that!) comes with relfective perimeter lines and is indeed yellow.
I am very interested in visibility, but my favorite paddle has black blades (Why does is so much of kayaking equipment built for espionage?). I would like to add some reflective tape to the blades, but don’t know what to get and where to put it without affecting the paddle in the water.
Any advice?
Reflective Tape
can be found in hardware and auto supply stores. They come in 2" wide tape. It’s a plastic film and once on the paddle is not at all in the way.
sing
Also
Any good marine supplier should stock it. Or if you prefer to shop on-line, here’s one source:
http://www.identi-tape.com/reflective_gateway.htm
I’ve had the SOLAS tape on my paddle blades for years with no sign of peeling.
Nigel Foster wrote this regarding kayak
Which colors show up best on the sea if you want to be seen? When I first bought a sea kayak my mentors said it was important to be visible and that the most visible colors lay in the red-orange-yellow range of the spectrum. I chose orange because that was right in the middle and ordered the kayak with orange deck and orange hull. I later decided I didn’t really like looking at orange all day! Hence the next choice, still in the same range; a yellow deck with a red hull. But research shows that these colors while bright don’t necessarily show up best. Red becomes less obvious in certain light…
White on the other hand reflects light so well it ought to be incredibly visible… except maybe when there are a lot of whitecaps out there? And black? Fishermen often find that black floats and black flags are easier to spot than brightly colored ones, especially when seen against the light…
Yet it’s the unlikely “robin-egg blue” that surprises most paddlers. Because it contrasts sharply against most sea kayaking backgrounds it too is highly visible.
Of course big blocks of a single color show up better than broken shapes, hence the smaller blocks of color that effectively break up the outlines and camouflage war ships…
But when I spot a kayaker in the distance, it is often the movement of the paddle that catches my eye first, sometimes long before I can make out the kayak. For all the color you can add to the kayak, moving a paddle in the air is more likely to attract attention.
visibility
Oddly, I have heard that some studies suggest it is Robin egg blue.