I went paddling yesterday with a group of plastic boats. One of the guys loaned me a boat to paddle. Now, I am not a young man and I don't get to paddle very often. But at the the end of the day I was tired but everyone was way faster than me. My ego has no problem with that, especially since I was beat and not to impressed with the boat I had been loaned.

But this got me to thinking about my design and what the numbers really mean out on the water. I decided to take the Hydro number and graph them from the different versions of the design and just see how they compared. One of the big things I was curious about was the scaled down 16' version vs. my 19' I was planning on building.

Once I get these into a graph where I can compare it comes back to what does it really mean? How much difference is really noticeable? I used the total resistance figure to make my graph. Looking at the 3.5 knot speed there the worst design has 2.37 lbs resistance verses 2.1 lbs for the best design. Seems minor and I would assume not noticeable to the average paddler.

So this brings me to question. At what point do these number really matter to the average paddler? Are we looking at .5 lbs or 1 lbs before we could really see a difference?