Quote:
Originally Posted by Devildawgjj
Interesting!! The article said, "robin-egg-blue."
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It's not so much an article just Nigel Foster's opinions on his Sea Kayaking blog.
Personally I'd disagree with him for a few reasons.
First off how about just some dumb practical experience. I've spent a few (ok much more then a few) hours offshore fishing small boats for tuna, paddy yellows and billfish. In that type of fishing you spend all day watching the water, scanning the horizon looking for kelp paddies and signs of fish. Sometimes one paddy can make the difference and save the whole day so your always watching the water.
I've found that for things that are a good ways off more then a few hundred yards white shows up best. White boats, white splashes from breaking fish that's pretty all you end up seeing when things are far away. There is a reason they have been making white boats for centuries. It's because you can see them. In general the trained eye can separate boats and breaking fish from cresting waves even though they are both white because they move in different ways.
Closer your eyes tend pick up color, for instance since paddies have a yellow tint often the first thing that cues you in to one being there is just a glimpse of yellow or yellowish brown in between the crests of waves, but that's usually pretty close to the boat. Further away you do not see the color of the paddy so much but instead the fact it breaks up the surface of the water around it, so usually you can only see really big paddies when they are far away, like a spot with no whitecaps is a paddy type of thing.
How about a little more theoretical.
Light is just energy. Or more direct light is nature's way of transferring energy through space. When you see something in daylight all your seeing is energy from the sun reflected off that object. The full spectrum of sunlight appears white to the human eye, however light itself is composed of many wavelengths which we see as color. If something appears red to us it's because it's reflecting the red wavelengths of light, if it's blue it's because it's reflecting the blue wavelengths etc.
White things simply reflect more light because they reflect the full spectrum not just a portion of it. So if you took a white blue and red kayak and shined the same amount of light on each you would get the most light reflected from the white kayak, simply because it reflects the full spectrum of the light, or the most light.
Then again we can't even see the full spectrum of light. The sun produces electromagnetic radiation of somewhere between 200 and a 1000nm while our eyes can perceive something like 400 to 750 nm and they are most sensitive to wavelengths of around 550 nanometers which is in the green yellow spectrum or roughly lime in Kayak color terms.
Ultimately what the human eye perceives in most cases out on the water is contrast. Far off white objects reflect the most light so you can see them at a greater distance because they contrast other things at that distance that are not reflecting as much light.
Up close you see more color contrast. Yellow orange show well against Blue because it's the opposite in spectrum just like red shows up well against green. That's not a product of the light itself it's simply about how our brain processes color. The color wheel aint physics, it's about how we organize colors to match our perceptions.
All that said blue light has a lot of energy behind it. Without getting too technical blue light has much shorter wavelength then say red light. The shorter the wavelength the better it is a pushing through stuff. This is why blue light actually penetrates deeper in sea water then red, it's also why bluelight is less effected by low level atmospheric scattering caused by low level atmospheric moisture etc.. which is not to be confused with selective atmospheric scattering which is what makes the sky blue, and sunsets red.
I imagine a light blue yak would show up better in low light high moisture conditions like fog then a red yak, but probably no better then a white yak because the white is reflecting the same blue light as the blue yak.
Personally I've found that at night flashing blue lights can be seen from a much greater distance the flashing red lights when on the water at night, which I'd attribute to scattering, which is why personally I now use blue LEDs for my hoop floats. That said they can't beat white lights. Often when scanning the night sea for boats when offshore I've noticed you almost always see the white all around Nav light first, then the forward Nav lights usually the green, then the port red sidelight depending on the boats orientation to you.
I guess it's all a matter of perception. Nigel's a kayaker and he's obviously talking about what he seen on the water from a kayakers perspective. In Nigels blog that was linked to above he says that often the first thing he sees is the yakkers paddle, and then he sees the color of the kayak. Well if you're close enough to see a paddle in the guys hands you're pretty close, and I gather that he sees the paddle first because it's higher and he's low to the water.
Now look at it from a boater, or Coast guard rescue boat, or even a rescue choppers perspective. Go out past four five hundred or a thousand yards you're not going to see the paddle. If anything you're going see the yak, and you're going to see a white yak quicker then any other color. I mean personally I like Lime green for visibility as it reflects a lot of light and is easy to see, and it's easier on my eyes when paddling on bright days but I doubt it's as anywhere as visible as white.
Jim