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Blue blends in... thats bad

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Thursday, 12 July 2007

Or is it?

Yellow is nicely visible at sea

Deciding upon which of the Hobie pedal kayaks would best suit my varied needs was tricky enough but I have to admit that settling on a colour took a bit more thought than I was expecting. That's because I see pros and cons in pretty much all of the colours available in the range (fishing versions or otherwise) and unlike before, I'm putting a lot of thought into every item I take along with me.

My first two Hobie kayaks have been of similar colours - the Sport having a stronger tinge of green, the Outback closer to a sandy grey. These colours are fairly popular with Bass, Cod and Trout fishermen and as I found out at the Boat show, hunters as well. The natural tones of these colours are the appealing factor, which is why I was drawn to them initially.

Issues of safety have played on my mind more and more lately, so when I saw the safety orange colour for the first time recently, I was rather taken by it. It's really quite bright, yet not alarmingly so and I think would probably hide marks and scratches pretty well. If you were washed out to sea, this is probably the kind of colour you'd want to be in. I considered the yellow version for similar reasons although I figured that with the kind of day in day out use I planned to give it, scuffs and scratches might show up a bit too clearly (call me vein). Still, like the safety orange colour, the long-range visibility would be fairly high.

The red colour... how could you not consider this for a moment. I mean, it's red! It goes faster! It's a fairly deep red, however and its long-range visibility isn't nearly as high as that of yellow or orange.

There are more serious concerns with blues and white or cream coloured kayaks when it comes to open water visibility. When white caps are present white coloured kayaks can get lost in them pretty easy, so they're not always as easy to spot as one might think. The inherent problem with the blue colour becomes obvious for similar reasons, but with no white caps required. But then when it comes to the blue colour, there's a flipside to all that, which is that a light blue colour probably has the best chance of blending when silhouetted in with the blue of the sky. The theory is that this can make your kayak, canoe or boat (whatever) more difficult to spot for fish. It's not hard to imagine that in shallower waters this could give an added dimension of stealth. Hrmmm...

You may be thinking that I've abandoned thoughts of safety for the sake of trying to trick a few more fish, but the truth is that I got the idea after doing a bunch of reading on kayaking around sharks. More than once it was suggested that a light blue coloured boat has more chance of being camouflaged by the sky and thus unnoticed by sharks.

So when it comes down to safety, it seems to be an issue of thinking about sharks or thinking about being seen on the water. In the end I did end up going for the blue one but probably only because I had to wait a week or so for an orange one to be delivered. This didn't bother me one bit, because I can always take other measures to be easily seen on the water. I have a yellow PFD for example, and 3 different light systems for the kayak. I also carry glow sticks and will be sure to pack some flares as well... just in case.

It's always interesting to note how close I can get squid or fish to get to my kayak. In this video I got almost within arms length to several fish following my "Squidplastic" lure. I wonder if I could encourage them any further with this new blue coloured Revolution.