Viking?
My pure Swede grandfather was in insurance because he said “there was no inventory.” Anyway, yes, I do drive an old V70 Volvo Wagon, and hopefully, some day, I’ll also drive a Point 65 Bourbon Orca?
http://www.point65.com/
Paddle fast, clyde
Again, not exactly
I only pointed out the “slipping backwards” aspect of the paddle to show that things get complicated if you try to account for all motion. That point is related to the fact that the only way to easily analyze the forces within the paddle is to look at the paddle itself.
As to forces not being balanced resulting in motion of the boat, think again about the driving forces when your car is going at constant speed down the highway. You might be going 70 mph, but the forces are balanced as I described in my previous post. Take away some of the wind resistance (such as by positioning a big truck right in front of the car), and a much lower throttle setting is needed to maintain the same speed (in other words, a lower driving force is needed to counteract the wind resistance). Forces are balanced when accelerating too. In that case, the driving force is balanced by inertia, and the rate of acceleration is determined by the relationship of inertia to the driving force. For example, a falling object is under the same gravitational force as it would be if sitting on the ground, but when falling it accelerates steadily until a speed is reached where the resistance of the passing air equals the gravitational force. You’ve heard of “terminal veloctiy”? That’s the speed where the friction of the object moving through the air equals the force of gravity (in the absence of air, a falling object will accelerate indefinitely). At any lower speed, the falling object will accelerate to faster speed. If you artifially launch the object toward the ground at a speed that’s faster than terminal velocity, the force of the air resistance is greater than the gravitational force, so the object slows down at a rate that’s governed by inertia (in physics, this slowing down is STILL called acceleration, because acceleration is simply a change in velocity.
Examples like this happen everywhere.
I’m really finding that I have a lot less time to go online the last few days, and it’s looking less and less like I can successfully communicate to you the reasons why having a paddle with the lower portion of the shaft being proportionately longer than the length that’s between your hands means you have to apply more force to produce a given force at the blade. At this point I doubt I will attempt to explain that anymore.
Appreciate Your Explanations
Guideboatguy, for I have 3 SUP paddles of different lengths: one chest high, another chin height, and another that’s a foot higher above my head, and I’ve found that I’m faster using the longer paddle. So you’re right, I must be applying more power using the longer paddle?
It could be
– Last Updated: Feb-17-12 5:33 PM EST –
To answer that completely, we'd need to know the spacing between your hands for each paddle, in addition to the overall length. Still, one thing that can confuse the issue is that no one usually paddles using all their strength. We all have plenty of reserve power on any given stroke we take, and "if it feels right" we can make use of some of our reserve strength to good effect with the right paddle, so even if the mechanical advantage might be less, we may not perceive it to be so nearly as easily as the laws of physics can show it. We may apply more force, and thus work harder over the course of along trip, but measuring energy output by a paddler isn't easy except perhaps in laboratory conditions, and who does that?. One person who answered one of my earlier posts clearly understood what I was saying about leverage, but he pointed out that there can be more to this than JUST the degree of mechanical advantage. Even though I didn't agree with everything he said, I do agree that how it feels to move the boat with various paddles won't always be clearly related to the degree of mechanical advantage. That's why I stuck to a strict interpretation of forces needed to power paddles with particular ratios of length between blade and lower hand and between hands. I would expect that delving into what actually feels right to the paddler is affected by too many variables to talk about matter-of-factly!
i want
The xp spyder. I’m completely obsessed with their boats.
Ryan L.
Go Try Out Those Sidewalk SUPs
Or skateboards that I see people paddling on the streets and malls with their long paddle like poles with t-grip?