Subject: Re: [baidarka] Everybody hibernating?
From: William Nettles (netttles@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Feb 22 2005 - 14:23:35 EST
Congrats to the students and their 12 kayaks.
I've read a few more books and tossed aside 1-1/2 decks from my strip
and glass Great Auk kayak, and am still stripping......(I get better
and better and I'm enjoying it. I just have to not think about how much
paddling I'd already have done had I built a traditional Greenland or a
Yost folder.)
So I'm about four months behind that schedule, delaying further
building a 'skin' yak quite a bit.
Not to revive the physics and voodoo of paddling, I've also been
looking into different ways to paddle (worried that my shoulders are
going to wear out) I looked at the Hobie Mirage Drive-which has two
fins sweeping perpendicular beneath a sit-on-top (we won't
mis-associate an Inuit name with it), and another more promising system
that's like a big whale fin at the back of the boat
http://www.tailboats.com/
I googled the MIT Robo-Tuna and Penguin Drive systems on the internet
which got me thinking and sketching. When I thought I'd either come up
with the 'Wright Flyer of fish drives' so I did the "Google test"-and
found tailboats.com (If you've got a 'eureka' type idea there's about a
98 percent chance of 1 of 2 things: Someone else thought of it first OR
Its a crackpot idea and someone else thought of it first.)
The reports and stats on these 'drives' is that the Hobie can get up to
4-4.5 knots the Tailboat can get up to about 4. They basically 'scull'
instead of paddle using legs instead of arms and torso. Legs are much
stronger. But I think both are very beginning technology and probably
have very little to do with making traditional frame kayaks.
Related to traditional frame stuff I made my son a pair of Ojibwa
snowshoes for Christmas, We went up to Kings Canyon to camp in the snow
(he forgot his boots-but that's OK he wore mine) and try them out. They
worked great, but the MSR plastic ones we rented for a second pair
worked even better. I wound up stumbling around the tall trees in my
sneakers on rawhide babiche while he ran around like Spiderman.
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