Glide

By John Winters

In Partnership With Swift Canoe & Kayak

2394 Highway 11 North RR#1

Gravenhurst, Ontario Canada
P1P1R1

Scribd Online Database Series

December 2010

© 2010 Swift Canoe & Kayak/John Winters. This document is not to be printed, distributed, sold for profit, or used in any
capacity outside the Scribd document database without the expressed written consent of Swift Canoe & Kayak and/or John
Winters
 GLIDE

Imagine for a moment that you are trying out nice new shiny canoe with a
knowledgeable friend. You stop paddling and the friend says, “Wow, this thing has great glide.”
Obviously the boat is very efficient, right? Well, not necessarily.
Glide (and the conclusions we draw from it) is one of those things that paddlers believe
in, a sort of canoeing “common wisdom”. But is it really valid? Here, then, is the low down (or
slow down) on glide.
To paddlers, glide is the distance a boat travels after you quit paddling. If the boat travels
a longish distance or seems to hold its speed well then it has good glide and ergo must be a
“fast” boat. If the boat is inefficient it will slow down quickly and not coast so far. Makes sense,
doesn’t it? Before we swallow the bait let’s see if we have all the information and one way to do
that is to look some extreme examples of how other boats glide.
Among the world champions in the glide department are the fully loaded VLCC’s (short for very
large crude carriers). Fully loaded at over 400,000
"Typical" Canoe Resistance
tons these babies can glide till next week. A poor
25 glider is a jet ski that comes to a rapid stop once the
20 power is turned off. Neither of these boats are very
good designs in canoe terms and yet the one is
Resistance

15
relatively slow and glides nicely and the other is
10 relatively fast but glides poorly. The VLCC glides by
5
virtue of its huge mass and stopping them is a
tremendous problem. Even at low speeds 400,000 tons
0
2 3 4 5 6
can do a lot of damage. The jet ski, despite its speed
Speed (Knots) when planing, is poorly designed for low speed and
Wavemaking Friction Total Resistance
stops like it has brakes. These are extreme examples
but the same physics applies to canoes.

Figure 1 Figure 1 graphs a typical canoe’s resistance

and its component parts, friction and wavemaking. At
speeds above four knots wavemaking is a major resistance constituent and rises rapidly while, at
speeds below two knots, friction is the major component and it rises slowly. The reason for this
variation lies in how resistance increases for the two resistance types. Friction increases as the
square of velocity while wavemaking resistance increases with the third or fourth power of
speed. In other words, twice the speed results in four times the frictional resistance but as much
eight times the wavemaking resistance. Fortunately wave making resistance starts out so low that
one has to be going pretty fast before it becomes an important factor. This “typical canoe”
unfortunately is not representative of all canoes. Some canoes are most efficient at high speeds
and some are most efficient at lower speeds and a lot in between.
Once we remove the power, the rate of deceleration will be a function of the resistance
and high resistance (in relative terms) will cause rapid deceleration. So, if you are traveling fast
and quit paddling the speed declines rapidly. Once down in the low speed range though the
deceleration is much slower. If all boats were the same, then glide would be a good measure of
resistance but all boats aren’t even close to being the same. Suppose we have two boats with
resistance curves as in Figure 2. Boat A will slow quickly at high speed and slowly (in a relative
way) at lower speeds. Boat B will slow more slowly at high speed but more rapidly at low
speeds. It is possible that both might actually glide the same distance before they come to a
 Canoe Resistance Comparison complete stop but they would
have very different performance
35 characteristics while you were
paddling. Boat A might be best
30
Resistance (lbs) for the more casual paddler while
25 B might be best for the strong
aggressive paddler even though
20 they might have the same glide!
15
10 As if that isn’t enough, a primary
speed robbing factor is the angle
5 of yaw or the angle the boat
0 makes with the intended course.
2 3 4 5 6 There are very few boats that
Speed (Knots) don’t yaw a little but some yaw
more than others and this will
affect the glide. Yaw can add as
Figure 2 much as 5% to the resistance
over that of a the same boat
traveling straight ahead. Obviously a boat that is yawing is going to look pretty bad while one
that is traveling nice and straight will look pretty good. Is it any wonder different paddlers get
different opinions of boats?
But, we aren’t finished. Remember that VLCC? Weight has same effect on canoes. Two
big guys might coast a lot farther that two lightweights in the same boat. So, is the boat good or
bad?
Does this mean that you can’t tell anything from glide? NO, it doesn’t. Glide can reveal a
lot about a boat’s performance if you have a very accurate speedometer that can measure and
record the speed at small increments of time and if you can control the yaw. Unfortunately the
casual paddler doesn’t have such a device or so much control.
So, how do you determine how efficient a boat is? Designers use performance prediction
programs that aren’t much fun but sure get the job done in a hurry. (To see what one is like
check out http://www.onlink.net/~jwinters/kaper.htm). The other way is to do a lot of paddling
in a lot of boats. It may not be perfect but even if you don’t come to any conclusions you should
still be having a good time.

© 2010 Swift Canoe & Kayak/John Winters. This document is not to be printed, distributed, sold for profit, or used in any
capacity outside the Scribd document database without the expressed written consent of Swift Canoe & Kayak and/or John
Winters