Merfluke Project Report #5: Yet another failure

Today I Merfluked 700 meters in 25 minutes at Lake Pflugerville.

This is a miserable failure; I can probably swim that distance in 15 minutes or less without any fins at at all.

On the bright side, I have invented an effective abdominal exercise machine. :->.

To explain the history of this trial, you may note that my last experiment taught me that despite my attempt to design pedals that would allow me to keep a firm contact with the Merfluke pedals, it didn't work. To correct this, I bought a pair of swim-fins, sawed the fins off the foot pockets with a hacksaw, and used a hot-melt glue gun to glue the foot pockets onto the pedals.

The glue did not work very well.  Within 10 minutes I had broken both foot pockets off.  However, since my foot was strapped into the pocket and the pocket thickened my foot I was indeed able to keep my feet in the pedals better.

Basically, my down kick provided a lot of propulsion, but the recovery stroke was very difficult and felt like it was actively slowing me down.  I had of course identified this as a problem before, but this trial has taught me that it is a critical problem.

Things look pretty grim for the success of the Merfluke, because:

• In order to make it work I have to have the feet securely in the pedals, and
• I previously claimed as an advantage NOT having to have the feet securely in the pedals.

So the combination of poor performance and needing to secure the feet is a double-whammy.

At present, my plan is to give my presentation at the Austin Mini-Maker Faire and then abandon this project.  I will probably move on to the Solar Cooker in a Public Park project I have written about here.

We cannot expect every project to succeed.  Hopefully, we learn something from our failures.

I do not believe that the design space of Thunniform swimming is completely exhausted.  That is, I think a better engineer than myself with additional effort might be able to achieve the stated goal of the Merfluke project: to allow a human athlete to swim faster than with a monofin.  However, I think the change of this happening is only 10-20%, and I think more benefit will be attained by going on to some other project.

Of course, if anyone disagrees and wants to continue working on this project, you have my blessing, support, and cooperation.