In my local club, I’ve been paddling with a few folks for years who have that stuff on their paddle blades and I have yet to see a single flash, though flashes of sunlight off wet blades are common, tape or no tape. Heck, I’ve been approached by boaters who thought I was in trouble too when I was far from shore, but I didn’t speculate that it must have been the reflective strips on my PFD that attracted them.
This has nothing to do with reflective tape “only working at night” (and nobody said that). It reflects all incident light at all times, but in the case of sunlight, it’s not reflected in a direction that other boaters will see. Here’s a very simple description of how Solas tape works, and with this, it should be intuitive that you can’t see sunlight reflected at you unless you are in an airplane with the plane’s shadow very nearly at the same location as the reflective tape (it will also work for a ground-based viewer for a few minutes at sunrise and sunset, only if the viewer looks toward the tape in-line with the projected light of the sun).
This is what Allen Olesen explained above as well, and if somehow this makes no sense to you, reply with evidence to the contrary. Everyone owns a camera phone today and you can easily photograph the reflection flash you are talking about, if indeed there’s a reflection to see. You can easily photograph the sun’s reflection off a mirror at any distance you choose, so do the same with the Solas tape on your paddles. Get about 50 to 100 feet away from a big target like the side of your house, manipulate your paddle blade to shine a patch of reflected sunlight there, set the paddle to hold that position, then go stand by the side of your house so your camera is in the reflected beam of light and take a picture (and remember to turn off the flash on your camera - using the camera’s flash would be cheating).
If you are using retro-reflective tape like SOLAS, you won’t be able to use it to shine sunlight at the side of your house and thus won’t get the photo either, but you need to give it a try and see it for yourself. Then try using a flat mirror, a shiny piece of metal or a compact disk to really illustrate what it is that the reflective tape failed to do.
A long sleeved fluorescent neon green rashguard proved effective today. During a conversation with a couple of jet-ski drivers I was told they could easily see me at a long distance. Was using my stick, so it was the shirt color, not necessarily paddle flash. Had no issues with the power boats.
@Guideboatguy said:
In my local club, I’ve been paddling with a few folks for years who have that stuff on their paddle blades and I have yet to see a single flash, though flashes of sunlight off wet blades are common, tape or no tape. Heck, I’ve been approached by boaters who thought I was in trouble too when I was far from shore, but I didn’t speculate that it must have been the reflective strips on my PFD that attracted them.
This has nothing to do with reflective tape “only working at night” (and nobody said that). It reflects all incident light at all times, but in the case of sunlight, it’s not reflected in a direction that other boaters will see. Here’s a very simple description of how Solas tape works, and with this, it should be intuitive that you can’t see sunlight reflected at you unless you are in an airplane with the plane’s shadow very nearly at the same location as the reflective tape (it will also work for a ground-based viewer for a few minutes at sunrise and sunset, only if the viewer looks toward the tape in-line with the projected light of the sun).
This is what Allen Olesen explained above as well, and if somehow this makes no sense to you, reply with evidence to the contrary. Everyone owns a camera phone today and you can easily photograph the reflection flash you are talking about, if indeed there’s a reflection to see. You can easily photograph the sun’s reflection off a mirror at any distance you choose, so do the same with the Solas tape on your paddles. Get about 50 to 100 feet away from a big target like the side of your house, manipulate your paddle blade to shine a patch of reflected sunlight there, set the paddle to hold that position, then go stand by the side of your house so your camera is in the reflected beam of light and take a picture (and remember to turn off the flash on your camera - using the camera’s flash would be cheating).
If you are using retro-reflective tape like SOLAS, you won’t be able to use it to shine sunlight at the side of your house and thus won’t get the photo either, but you need to give it a try and see it for yourself. Then try using a flat mirror, a shiny piece of metal or a compact disk to really illustrate what it is that the reflective tape failed to do.
You seem to be really hung up on the fact that Solas tapes (supposedly) only reflects in the direction from which light is striking it.
The truth is that sunlight is striking objects from a huge variation in angles due to a phenomena called scattering. That is why the sky is blue.
If you want to be seen, put solas tape on your paddles and paddle normally. The motion makes flashes which are quite visible to power boaters and people who are ashore.
I’m not “hung up” on the idea. What I’m “hung up” on, if anything, is evidence-based decision making and proper portrayal of physical processes (and equating scattering of the kind that makes the sky appear blue with the kind of bright reflection you mention is far from an accurate portrayal of these physical processes, and in fact, the unusually low level of scattering is why the tape looks so dark on a sunny day compared to ordinary materials of similar color (and I’m not the first to point that out here)). The tape is specifically designed to work in the way I tried to describe for you and there are loads of other websites out there that say the same. The design is amazingly successful to that end, which is what a couple other posters here have mentioned (one poster having done so in an older thread, rather than here). I offered you an easy method of making an evidence-based decision about this, but your reply indicates that you prefer to not to think about things that way.
Whatever bit of slight glow that you can see when holding SOLAS tape in your hands, besides being mostly directed in a useless direction, has a level of intensity which is nothing in comparison to that of a typical good reflection, and you will see that as soon as you try to use the tape to reflect a beam of sunlight at the side of your house (or whatever suitable target at some distance that you have).
So anyway, that’s as much as I’ll say, and yes, I did spend the whole afternoon and part of the evening on a favorite local river.