Paddling Science: Tale of the Tape

I've been thinking about the contents of my repair kit recently and that's perhaps a sad commentary on my life. In any case, one of the things that should probably be in a repair kit, says I, is some sort of tape. I happen to have a bit of Denso tape in my kit, which is really good for fixing things like a hole in a boat. But Denso is pretty expensive and can be terribly messy to work with. You really wouldn't want to use it for, say, well, anything but patching holes in boats probably. Honestly, it's a helluva mess to work with. So when someone in my club announced a surf zone play day (SZPD. I love acronyms) I thought, "Sweet, this is a great time to test some tapes. And to surf a bit.". An SZPD is, not surprisingly I hope, a day to play in the surf zone. This particular day turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. Blue skies, reasonably warm temperatures and gentle 2s and 3s that were only a little dumpy. I even put sunscreen on.

I'd chosen two tapes to test. Here they are:

I picked Duck tape because it comes in cool colors. There was hot pink, red, green, the orange you see here, and a bunch of others. If it worked I could get several rolls of different colors and make special tape designs on my boat or something. The other one, as you see, is Gorilla tape. I got that because the glue (Gorilla Glue) by the same manufacturer claims that it's 100% waterproof and for a couple of things I've used it for that's been true. I guess you could say I got the Duck because it was cool, and the Gorilla because it was pragmatic.

What with this tape testing being really scientific and all I didn't want to limit my tests to a single boat. So I enlisted one of the people who showed up for the SZPD and happened to have a plastic boat. Here are the test subjects:

The Romany there is mine and it's a fiberglass boat. The Necky is the volunteers and it's some sort of plastic. I decided I was going to simulate patching a small hole under the seat of each of the boats even though I wouldn't use the tape for that if I had some Denso with me. Here's the tape on the volunteer boat:

You can see there that the tape has been measured and cut with some precision because, as I said, this is a scientific endeavor. 

Here's the tape on my boat:

Note again please the extreme care with which the tape has been measured and cut. Also, it was agreed that in terms of Rippability(tm) the Duck tape was far easier to rip. That said the Gorilla tape was easy to rip, just not as easy as the Duck tape.

With the tape applied it was time to get on the water. Note that the tape was applied to dry boats. This being an SZPD the owner of the volunteer boat wanted to practice launching into waves. Here she goes:

Despite what you're seeing the waves actually did get a little bigger than what's in the picture here. I should also mention that I didn't get explicit permission to use the volunteers name, so I'm just going to keep calling her Volunteer. To protect her privacy and stuff.

Here our nameless Volunteer is after getting out:

For myself I carried my boat into the water and plopped in, so the tape on my boat didn't have the more real world treatment that Volunteer subjected her tape to.

In the event we were out for about 2.5 hours or so. I only got put on the beach once, meaning I only subjected the tape on my boat to one knuckle walk on the sandy beach. Volunteer swam a couple times and so ended up putting her tape through rather more harrowing circumstances due to trips to the beach to empty out her boat.

By way of demonstrating the really gentle conditions of the day, as well as my suck ass timing when it comes to taking action pictures, here's one of the participants breaking through a wave:

Suck ass timing.

I guess I should have mentioned this before, but the SZPD took place in Monterey, CA. Monterey is a pretty nice place I think. Here's a picture of our view from the water:

I've never been to the Mediterranean but I've seen pictures and I think they look like Monterey. Or vice versa. Whatever. It's awfully nice.

While I'm at it, take a look at this:

That's a rainbow and, at the end of the rainbow, are two coast guard boats. They were doing some sort of exercise. There were a heck of a lot of folks in life jackets on the white boat. The other boat kept zooming in, then out, then in. No idea what they were doing, but I've never taken a picture of a rainbow before so I'm glad this sort of came out.

Right, enough of that, there is science to be done here. Like I said we were out about 2.5 hours or so. Upon arrival back at our put in, here's the results:

As you can see,  the gentler treatment the tape received on my boat resulted in the Duck tape remaining affixed and the Gorilla tape actually looking pretty darn good. Meanwhile the Duck tape has fallen of of Volunteers boat and the Gorilla tape is barely hanging on.

So there you have it. What conclusions can be drawn from this experiment? Well I'm not a scientist so who the hell knows for sure, but I'm going to keep a little Gorilla tape in my repair kit. Many thanks to the unnamed volunteer for her assistance and to everyone else who was there for making it a nice day of science on the water.