Way to rock your inner Crocidile Dundee! Loved that video. Cool how they were working the apparent wind angle by driving the kite through figure
eights. The folks involved in the SkySails venture were brainy highly engineers. I was struck by how small the kite seemed relative to the absolutely
enormous mass of the cargo ship. I'm wondering if the limiting factor is the connection point of the kite mast to the ship as they made a point of
that interface in the video. There would be some enormous torques there.
As for the "inventor" featured in the original TV clip posted by Jeff, he might want to try out that Google thing and notice what else is out there.
:saint:awindofchange - 11-7-2017 at 05:14 PM
We were doing this with Kayaks about 15 years ago. Worked quite well but there were some serious issues. Main one is that the Kayak would gain so
much speed it would out-run the kite unless you turned directly downwind which made things even worse. Solved that issue a bit with dropping a large
sea anchor behind to add lots of drag to the boat. Also you needed to add in a huge skag to the bottom or if you got to the side the kite would just
rip you off or roll you over. I realize the kayak is not the same as a paddle board but I feel the results would be the same if not worse. Still, if
the wind was the right direction it was quite fun.Bladerunner - 11-7-2017 at 05:53 PM
I think Corey's Dad patented the bar in the mid 90's.
Peter Lynn came out with the kite boat , kite cat' shortly after that.
@awindofchange - By staying back on the paddle board and tipping the rail I was able to make tracks pretty much across the wind with my NPW 21 (2.9
M). Turning was pretty easy, though I did lose ground upwind. I think with side thrusters and bigger kites on my SUP I may be able to improve on
that. Problem with kayaks generally is lack of lateral resistance so it is hard to do anything other than a mainly downwind course. Here is one of
my GPS tracks from the day the video was shot.
