Crossing Lake Michigan in a Bathtub | Hacker News Reader

Crossing Lake Michigan in a Bathtub

lansingstatejournal.com

60 pointsrmason11 comments

I actually knew this guy when it happened. We were both members of the same amateur radio club in Lansing. I didn't know him well but remember fondly how the club went nuts when he succeeded. When he returned to the next meeting he was given a true heroes welcome.

That’s nice and all, but obviously he didn’t just cross in a tub; more like a boat with a bathtub attached.

More like unsinkable steel drums with a bath tube in between as the platform. Still remarkable though.

Yeah. His design seems like overkill. It's "only" ~120mi across lake Michigan. In good weather you could do that in an afternoon in just about anything (people have paddle boarded across it).

The primary limitation of using a bathtub is that it doesn't really have enough displacement to carry a person plus all the fuel and beer needed for such a trip and it makes a shitty planing hull so that's gonna increase your travel time thereby increasing your beer requirements (beer is a mainstay of all recreational boating activities) and the increased weight increases your draft increasing your fuel requirements (it's a vicious cycle). Still sucks less than driving through Chicago though.

"In good weather you could do that in an afternoon in just about anything (people have paddle boarded across it)."

It sounds like one of the problems he faced is that 50 years ago, knowing whether or not the weather would be "nice" was a non-trivial challenge.

For those who don't live in the area and may not know, in not-nice weather, the Great Lakes get up to oceanic levels of danger, and some have argued Superior may even be a bit more dangerous than the open ocean. Treating them lightly is ill-advised.

Weather forecasting 50yr ago was more than good enough to tell you whether a particular day would be a good day (especially in the middle of North America where you can rely on observations further west and north to tell you about upcoming fronts). You don't need a week of clear weather to do this.

Satellites gave us good long term forecasting (we know there is a hurricane that's gonna hit in a week or two). Computers gave us super accurate short term forecasting (we know exactly what time this afternoon it will start raining and how hard). Being able to know a day in advance what the weather will be has been a skill we have had with decent accuracy since the development of the telegraph (and the ability to know the weather in other locations much faster than the weather changes).

Your primary concern in an un-seaworthy vessel (such as a bathtub) will be the surf. If you are not time constrained it is not hard to wait for a high pressure front to park its butt over the body of water you wish to traverse. It is only dangerous if you make it dangerous by being sloppy.

Crossing the great lakes is an exersise in planning. Just because it requires basically no effort to do said planning today doesn't mean it wasn't very possible then. As stated in TFA people crossed lake michigan in all sorts of craft. The reason he chose a bathtub is because nobody has done it.

> Jackson said his success in the bathtub boat gave him > confidence in life. He founded [several big things and > did good in life].

Does facing danger have a mood/personality hardening effect? I find it somewhat inspiring and thought it deserved to be stressed out from what looks just like a funny article.

I think so. I grew up surrounded by WW2 vets that had seen lots of combat and lived through the Great Depression. They were good men but they were pretty hardened people.

On Vancouver Island, there's also the bathtub races:

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=nan...

And on the other side of the coin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henley-on-Todd_Regatta

This actually sounds like tons of fun haha

Reply on news.ycombinator.com