yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

When Watersports Become Dangerous | Science of Stupid: Ridiculous Fails


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Some things just don't go together-- oil and water, gas and matches, tequila and fireworks. So you can imagine my concern when I heard about a combination of kayaking and surfing.

Then I saw this and thought perhaps I'm worrying about nothing. And then I saw this and realized I was right the first time.

All right. If we're going to go treating a kayak like a surfboard, we'd better prep on center of buoyancy and hydrodynamic drag. To remain stable, a kayaker keeps the center of mass directly over the kayak center of buoyancy, which is in the middle of its submerged volume. Traveling out to sea, it helps to keep the kayak perpendicular to the waves, because turning sideways can mean more hydrodynamic drag and a salty roll.

When catching a wave, you must ensure the nose doesn't dig into the water; otherwise, the resulting increase in hydrodynamic drag could produce a turning effect. Waves can travel hundreds of miles, relentlessly building speed and power before smashing into your kayak, but we should be OK-- providing we remember the rules.

Hold on a minute, should we be perpendicular to the wave or parallel to it? Yes, it was perpendicular. By hitting the wave almost parallel he presents a large surface area, which leads to enough hydrodynamic drag to flip the kayak.

We are out and ready to catch a wave. I'm videoing this just in case things don't go well. That's a little negative. Confident, confident. But well-founded. Good start, but here the nose digs in, slows down, and our friends enjoy the benefits of the turning effect.

Now these guys have got it nice and perpendicular, minimal drag. Like a knife through salty butter.

NARRATOR: Maybe it's safer to avoid all that nasty drag and head out of the surf to calm open sea. There it is. There it is.

NARRATOR: Oh, look-- a delightful little fish.

More Articles

View All
Kirchhoff's current law | Circuit analysis | Electrical engineering | Khan Academy
Up to now, we’ve talked about, uh, resistors, capacitors, and other components, and we’ve connected them up and learned about OHS law for resistors. We also learned some things about series resistors, like we show here the idea of Kirchhoff’s laws. These …
Halle Bailey Sits Down with Nat Geo Explorer Aliyah Griffith | National Geographic
[Music] Hey there! I’m Deborah Adams Simmons from National Geographic. Today I’m here at the Seas with Nemo and Friends in Epcot, and I’m thrilled to be hanging out with National Geographic Explorer and marine scientist Aaliyah Griffith and Miss Hallie Ba…
YC Tech Talks: Climate Tech with Charge Robotics (S21), Wright Electric (W17) and Impossible Mining
[Music] I’m Paige Amora. I work at Y Combinator. I’m on our work at a startup team, so we’re the team that helps our portfolio companies hire. For this event, we’ll do three tech talks. These will just be about a technical topic that the founders find int…
Writing geometric series in sigma notation
So we have a sum here of 2 plus 6 plus 18 plus 54, and we could obviously just evaluate it, add up these numbers. But what I want to do is I want to use it as practice for rewriting a series like this using sigma notation. So let’s just think about what’…
Watch Scientists Catch Crocodiles—in the Dark | National Geographic
The morti crocodile. They’re powerful, they’re prehistoric, yet their biosphere is very delicate. Teaching locals and teaching tourists about this type of crocodile is very important for projects of conservation that Amigo Deanan is spearheading and for e…
Common denominators: 1/4 and 5/6 | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
You have two fractions: 1⁄4 and 56, and you want to rewrite them so they have the same denominator and have whole number numerators. What numbers could you use for the denominator? So, here’s our fractions: 1⁄4 and 56, and we want to rewrite these fracti…