I do it all the time
I just stand up in the canoe, set the pole, adjust the angle, and voila! Goin’ nowhere until the rest of 'em catch up!
-rs
sloped face
Think of a totally green wave face - no foam pile. As your boat sits on the wave face, it’s pointing ‘downhill’ with gravity making it slide upstream.
or
if you have a huge iron deposit in the boat and are floating over a big magnet
that’s great!
rvwen
Not a good place to play if you’re easily offended. Especially if you’re outside the conventional wisdom.
Longboats = flatwater & ocean
short boats = whitewater
I take my longboats on Class II+ whitewater. Its a hoot, but you gotta pay attention. And if you don’t have a good automatic brace, you’ll get one! Or end up swimming a bunch.
gravity?
Still trying to understand your concept here. I’m not familiar with the term “green wave”. I may be a dinosaur but I’ve surfed hundreds of rapids and never felt that gravity was involved. All the surfing waves I’ve been on were created when the gradient dropped and a reversal was created. Gravity is a constant, it’s hydrolics that change and create an area where equal but opposite forces cause the hull to be at equilibrium.
Pagayeur
Not a good place to play if you’re easil
Assuming you are correct, why does it have to be this way?
Is there something wrong with civility and manners?
Or, are most paddlers just rude?
Slick spot?
Do you mean a wave or hole?
think about a stopper wave
– Last Updated: Jun-29-07 1:56 PM EST –
It's more than recirculating water. Gravity is involved in preventing you from going up and over in the first place.
nope, not a hole or wave
look for flat, glassy spots. In the rivers I’m on the glassy spots are from 3 feet to 10 feet in diameter. If they are big enough it is possible to sit still on these slicks without moving upstream or downstream. They are very useful in making your way back upstream if you don’t have an eddy right close by.
water reflecting off of bottom structure
Seems to me it is usually large bottom structure too, like bridgeworks or large boulders. To me, these spots can also indicate things to avoid.
rvwen
I think its just a function of internet forums. People are relatively anonymous here so you can act as you please. The down side is that this means that this represents people’s true side, without the pretend to be nice stuff. I think its similar to road rage. People screaming at other folks when they would never do it face-to-face.
Boil?
Maybe a boil? Water being pushed upwards?
I think that’s what Andy’s talking about
green wave
– Last Updated: Jun-29-07 4:00 PM EST –
Green as in smooth -- green water, green tongue, etc. A green wave is a nice glassy wave with little or no foam pile or 'reversal' at the peak. I thought that was a pretty universal term.
Think about it. What makes the boat want to slide down the face of a wave and into the trough? Sure, in a hole or on a breaking wave, the foam pile does the work. But on a glassy wave, it's gravity, pure and simple.
here’s a challenge
When you paddle on the river next time look for a small area, maybe 3 to 6 feet in diameter, that is glassy smooth. Once you find one then look just upstream and find another, then another. They are all over the place. They are not boils, or waves, or holes, or anything other than just a simple, smooth, slick surface that is different from the current around it.
Frankie Hubbard used slick spots to win races. Bob Foote teaches students to use slick spots to attain. They are a simple river feature and they are cute and fun to play around in.
I do the same thing
Occasional power strokes or sweeps. That would explain it then. When I first got into paddling and rowing little boats in a big way, I was pretty amazed at how easy it is to perch one’s boat in a zone of apparently pretty fast current, and just sit there with just a minimal amount of low-power strokes to keep the boat pointed the right way, but after all, the boat is just gliding the same way it would if you “nearly” stopped paddling on still water, paddling just enough to keep your boat from skidding into a turn by itself, which is inevitable if you don’t apply some correction as you glide. Without some forward power, this couldn’t be done.
Funny hydraulics swirling around and “pushing” from the rear isn’t what’s happening. Otherwise, in still water, you’d never have to paddle again once you got your speed up. The water is passing over the hull the same whether you are paddling in still water or upstream (or downstream for that matter, and this is the principle behind the question on the other thread about how current speed affects actual speed).
Fascinating stuff
– Last Updated: Jun-29-07 7:39 PM EST –
As much as I watch the surface for indications of what the current is doing, I don't think I've seen the patterns you are speaking of. However, since the patterns I DO see vary quite a bit depending on the structure of the river (speed and gradient, bottom type, etc.), that may be why I haven't seen them. The closest thing I've seen to this are boils which appear and disappear, never staying in the same place for long.
One really neat thing I have seen in places having *very* slow current (such as dead-slow rivers, or zones in a calm lake far out from an inlet) are slick spots in the form of irregular stripes and other complex patterns, which only show up when it's raining. You can see this best with a steady rain (it's gotta be more than just sprinkling to work best), but not rain that's too heavy. If you look closely at these patterns of slick and non-slick water, you can see that they are created by currents, but the currents are so slow as to be nearly imperceptible unless you really take your time to watch them. I've never been able to see these patterns when it is not raining, but they really stand out when it is. Hey, it's not the most exciting thing in the world, but I've always enjoyed seeing them, and think they are pretty cool.
By the way, when it's raining, you can also see the path taken by a boat for a really long time after it passes. The path of a motor boat may be visible under these conditions for 10 or 20 minutes, and the path of a canoe or kayak can be seen for close to 5 minutes. The same thing is happening in this case as described above. Turbulence behind the boat which fades to unnoticible levels within seconds (at least for paddle craft) doesn't actually cease for quite a while, and it remains visible a long time IF the water is calm and IF it is raining. In my rowboats, since I face backward, I can see my "trail" for an incredible distance behind me if it's raining the right amount.
The rain does something to the water's surface that accentuates the visible evidence of what the currents are doing, and sometimes it looks like converging currents simply act to cause trace accumulations of organic debris which makes the water look "slicker" than it otherwise would but that's just a guess (in other words, perhaps it's basically a small-scale version of what you see with Langmuir spirals on a windy day).
thoughtful observation
I recently paddled a 4 mile round trip on a dam reservoir and on the return leg I met a john boat and followed his bubble trail all the way back to the ramp, probably a good 10 minutes that his path was still visible.
“Stopper Wave”
– Last Updated: Jun-30-07 5:18 PM EST –
I've never heard the term "stopper wave", but I'm pretty sure I know what you mean by that. Once I got stuck sideways in the low spot right in front of a wave, and for the life of me, I could not pull myself over that wave. The wave wasn't that high, and the current was just screaming past my boat, threatening to roll me right over at any moment, but the boat would NOT follow the current. Even though when I buried my paddle blade deep within that current I could barely hold it there, I couldn't horse my boat up the side of that wave and on to "freedom" on the downstream side.
What my boat was doing was sliding downhill on the front face of that wave, travelling upstream at the same speed as the current was going downstream, and gravity was the driving force keeping my boat in one spot. The term "stopper wave" would describe this very well, because that wave completely "stopped" me from going downstream. I'd already riden through that wave once just fine by hitting it head-on at the same speed as the current, but scooting out in front of it sideways to the current, and lacking any momentum in the downstream direction, I was as good as anchored there.
For what it's worth, gravity is involved in all upstream river surfing. It takes very little slope to cause the boat to slide along at great speed, but the boat won't actually go faster than the current for more than a brief instant, because there's always an "end" to that downhill slope which the boat cannot coast beyond (without some additional propulsive force).
********
By the way Clarion, you can probably appreciate that the reason I wasn't flipped in this situation is the amazingly forgiving nature of a round-bottomed boat like a Supernova. In any other boat I've tried, I wouldn't have lasted long before getting tossed.