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Making the World's Fastest Kayak

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the love-boats dept.

bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at the world's fastest kayak, which floats over the water rather than nosing through waves like more typical boats. Named 'Little Wing' for the fore and aft wings that add stability, the kayak is the creation of Ted Warren. An MIT-educated engineer, Warren 'played around for three years with 3-D wire mesh designs on his PC, crunching the numbers for speed and stability, then started building actual models to test in the waters near his Massachusetts home.'"

4 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Missing information? by moronga · · Score: 1, Insightful

    How fast does this damned thing go? o_O

    I RTFA, and I don't see them say anything about speed.

  2. Re:Not even close to the world's fastest by shawn(at)fsu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't think he's a novice. I read it as he only trained for three days with this particular hull design. All in this entire article sucked. Happy feel good story with little to no technical details at all. Pretty much what I as a techie nerd would expect to get out of a business week article.

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  3. What makes this the worlds fastest kayak? by viking2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only support for the statement that this is the worlds fastest kayak is:

    1. The builder goes to MIT
    2. The journalist thinks it is fast.

    You start to wonder what kind of people goes to MIT. If you, dear /. reader, went to the newspaper to tell them you had built the worlds fastest something, (say car).

    Would you not have some data to support your claim? A radar gun readout? A win in some competition? Anything?

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  4. Article Is Self Promotion by aldheorte · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Article summary: Rich yuppy buys overly expensive kayak because it is "fast" and "looks like a ferrari", although he is unable to explain why, from a technical perspective, it is any better than a regular kayak. He almost exclusively talks about his little vignette of crossing the Long Island Sound in it, pandering on about how he was buying the $5000 kayak so he could get sponsors to give $500 or so to "needy children" for his little cross bay adventure. He gives props to his friends, who will no doubt be tickled to be in BusinessWeek.

    Before you mod troll, read article and you will see it is completely devoid of any technical or scientific interest. Slashdot's slogan is "stuff that matters". This stuff does not.