Extreme HULIing

This past Thursday was a very windy day. For those of you who failed to notice this, basically, fail. One of the most noticeable effects of the wind and rain was the massive (for Waikiki) waves at Waikiki Beach. Although I was given the chance to paddle with the Varsity guys, mainly because everyone else above me wasn't there for unknown reasons(e.g. theatre, sick, robotics, didn't want to, drafted elsewhere, run swimming, missed the bus, etc.), the waves still looked pretty discouraging. AS we paddled through the channel, our boat started taking on a lot of waves. In a few seconds our boat was completely filled and we were forced to bail out. Our boat's mass increased, but our volume stayed the same, so our density increased. Thus our boat started to sink.

very long swim


Now the physics part comes in as we tried, in vain to huli our boat (For non-paddlers huli means to flip it.) After forty or so attempts at flipping the boat it became obvious that the buoyancy force wasn't significant enough to hold the boat up and allow us to bail out the water. The equation Fb=pVg meant that our mass was somehow different because the volume of the boat was still the same. After about an hour of flipping swimming the boat out and flipping some more, the waves proved too much for our crew, two kayakers, and another crew to flip over our one boat. As we decided to swim back to shore, I was stuck with the job of supporting the water-filled back because i was the swimmer. I realized that the back was water-filled when the rest of the boat would ride the wave and it would sink far below it. So on the day of the buoyancy test, buoyancy seemed to be against me in the classroom and at practice.