I was talking about the question …
… of that moment, which was right there at hand:
“So if I put 30 pounds of pressure on a wing paddle for a stroke am I going any faster or farther than if I put 30 pounds of pressure on an equally long stroke with a euro paddle?”
I realize the answer cannot be applied in a very direct fashion due to the different direction of the force applied, but the force counteracting the lift could be compared to the “normal” force of a conventional paddle. Just break the forces into components. I realize that no one has probably done this, so the answer would only be an estimate.
Fair enough
I get your point now - this is a messy issue that really needs to be addressed in three dimensions. I’m hoping to do some experiments to address this issue directly, but they’re going to be a mess to design.
Ha! Better you than me!
Quantifying that stuff in any useful way is way beyond anything I can imagine.
To Summarize:
For a wing to work well a paddler uses lots of torso. Hence more power. When a wing works well it provides more ‘bite’ than other designs. If I think of it as a pole scraping the bottom, the wing design stays planted more than other designs… therefore one stroke takes the boat a little further… the paddler has to take fewer strokes over a distance.
Now… would the wing’s non-power blade have an aero advantage over a euro? I would think it would having less surface area and the ‘drag’ part of the wing would be facing the opposite direction.
Too many cooks spoil the broth Rex !
Just try one out and forget what everyone here has said.
The paddle will tell you if you are paddling it correctly, or not.
I have a good friend who is a high end paddler, (BCU rated 4 or whatever that nonsense is) and he was having a lot of back problems.
He used to tell him self over and over again with each stroke: “Ratate, rotate”. It took him several years before he realized it was the too much rotation that was hurting his back.
Jack L
Hey Jack
I got a bike ride in this morning without suffering any frostbite. Let’s get together and swap paddles for a while when it warms up.
Yeah, I’ve wondered for some time … if you’re pushing with the same force, what difference does a blade shape make? Guess I’m finding out.
Send us some heat!
Wrecks
Not necessarily
You say “So if a wing paddle is ‘faster’ than other paddles it is just providing more resistance or resistance for a longer time per stroke than other paddles. Right?”
Not necessarily. The wing converts the effort you put into it more efficiently into forward motion than a non-wing. That does not mean it is harder to pull on a wing. As Pat (ONNO) said, for the same effort you get more forward speed. Or you can maintain the same forward speed with less effort. That’s due to the more “efficient” wing shape.
Rocket Propulsion
Strictly speaking everything is propelled by rocket-style propulsion. Kayaks, speedboats, birds, turtles, bicycles etc all move forward by forcing something else backwards. Conservation of momentum requires it. A 100 kg man accelerating a bike up to the 10 m/second changes the rotation of the earth by something like 10^-22 meters per second.
At best 100% efficiency can only be something approaching 100%.
A purely drag paddle grabs a hold of a slug of water and moves it backwards, a perfect wing uses the differential of fluid speeds over the top and bottom of the wing to create a jet of water off the trailing edge of the wing that moves backwards (down). The result is the same, the boat is moved forward by accelerating water backwards.
Exactly how the water is accelerated (Bernoulli or whatever) doesn’t really matter that much, what matters for efficiency is how much water is accelerated (and directly related to that how fast it is accelerated).
If you don’t move water, you don’t move the boat, but the large mass of water moved, the slower it gets moved and the lower kinetic energy imparted to the water, the more efficient the means of propulsion. Wings do a good job of accelerating a large mass of fluid quite slowly.