Can You Swim in Shade Balls?

I'm in! I'm floating in shade balls! This feels incredible because, like, I can hardly tell there's water under me. It feels like just being in a ball pit. But it's kind of like quicksand. Oh no! Uh oh! I feel like this is the Internet's fault because I made this video about the shade balls on LA reservoir, and a lot of people asked: can you swim in shade balls? And I'm like, it's a drinking reservoir, obviously you can't swim in the drinking water. But then I thought, you know what, we know the people who actually made these shade balls, and so I could call them up and order them. And sure enough, I've purchased 10,000 shade balls to try to swim in.

Now there is a scientific and safe way to test this, which would be to go in the shallow end, but I'm gonna do the YouTube way, which is to jump in the deep end and just see if I can swim. In 3... 2... 1... It was probably right about now that I thought back to my conversation with the shade ball manufacturer: you don't recommend swimming in shade balls. So do you think it's a bit dangerous? Maybe so dangerous, in fact, that he regularly refuses requests from residential customers. They didn't even want to sell me shade balls. I appreciate you making an exception for our channel and for science, and we will not promote this as a thing that people should do. We will show people what happens, and therefore that they should probably not do it.

What makes shade balls inherently more dangerous than other plastic balls is that they're half-full of water, so they're heavy. This bag of 1,200 shade balls weighs 300 kilograms or 660 pounds. So when I ordered 10,000 of these things, I didn't really think about how hard it would be to get them home. And now we have them all in the back of U-Haul. Now the only challenge: get in the mouth after driving the largest vehicle I've ever attempted across LA. I hired a moving company; it's time to release the balls.

Kind of surprised 6,000 shade balls doesn't quite cover the whole pool, but it's just about there. You can see already the balls have sort of arranged themselves in crystal structures for their clothes packed, and then there's some boundaries between these grains. We've basically got a single layer of balls on the whole pool. I'm gonna jump in and try to swim with them. We'll see how that works, and if I can do that, then we have 3,600 more and we can put on top.

Which brings us back to what I'm swimming. So this is breaststroke, and I can swim, but I am getting a lot of balls into the face. A few observations: for objects whose purpose is to block out sunlight, a surprising amount still gets through. That's because even packed as tightly as possible, spheres only cover about 91% of the water surface. Light coming through the cracks and reflecting off the balls makes these really interesting patterns on the bottom of the pool. When swimming through shade balls, the other thing that hits you is the noise. They make so much noise, so close to your head that it's virtually impossible to hear anything else. I feel like you're getting an extra workout!

Frankly, I'm gonna try a different swim stroke. I'm gonna go over to front crawl or freestyle. Ah! I feel like I got like a bloody lip. I feel like I'm getting knocked around like in a rock tumbler. Swimming in shade balls made me reflect on drag, the force that opposes motion when moving through a fluid. Drag is typically proportional to your velocity squared. Why is that? Well, let's imagine these shade balls as particles of their own fluid, and the faster you go, the more of them you encounter per second. But also, the faster they're moving relative to you, and hence the impact they have on you as you push them out of the way.

So that's why drag is proportional to V squared: because you run into more of them, and they're moving faster relative to you, so they have a greater impact. Swimming is a good workout; swimming through shade balls: next level. Next level! So I'm not actually the best swimmer, so I brought over some friends, Christian and Jorden. Butterfly is even more challenging because not only do you have to push the balls forward, they also get pushed down and up and out.

However, that's insane! It looks hard; you can hit your face with your shoulders. So with it clear that you can swim, albeit with difficulty, in a single layer of shade balls, it was time to test if you can swim in multi-layer shade balls. This is in fact how most of LA reservoir is covered. It looks as though you could float on the top, so I'm gonna see if I can run across these shade balls. It's gonna end poorly, I'm sure. Three, two, one...

Similar attempts to slide across the surface of the shade balls were also doomed to failure. Each ball is almost half full of water, so when fully submerged, it only supports around 300 grams. That means to support my body entirely above the water, I'd need more than 260 shade balls trapped under mine. This is amazing! I'm still—I'm still! But what about the central question: can you swim in multiple layers of shade? I don't think you can swim... until I found the kind of unorthodox style: swimming mostly beneath the shade balls.

Just like the guy in the boat said, you just don't move. I was swimming—I don't say good—and I just couldn't like go anywhere. But don't just take my word for it; watch Jordan try butterfly. Amazing! Unlike in the single layer, where the balls could easily move past each other, with multiple layers, the balls kind of get trapped against each other and act more like a solid, providing significantly more resistance.

So I wanted to see if I could use this to my advantage to lower myself gently down with the hose hit and see if I can float on top of all these v-shaped balls. Alright, I'm floating in shade! Oh, this feels incredible because, like, I can hardly tell there's water under me. It feels like just being in a ball pit. That is exactly like quicksand! Oh my goodness! If you don't move, you're good on the surface, but then if you start moving around, all the balls get enough energy to sort of shift, and then you start sinking down deeper and deeper and deeper.

Now, after all this, the one question I'm left with is: what do you do with 10,000 shade balls? Well, I've decided that I am going to sign each one and mail it out to a Patreon supporter. So if you want to receive one of these balls signed by me, go and sign up to be a Patreon supporter now! My plan is to send these out to basically every Patreon supporter I have everywhere in the world. I'll put more details in the description below. Obviously, the shipping costs are going to be horrendous, but it is your support on Patreon that allows me to do things like this. So this is my way of saying thank you.