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Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Just add a low voltage electric fence to 2 plates glued underwater at port and starboard. Salt water conducts, also Orca's conduct - some small current flow that will be repellant to the Orca's, but not harmful. They do this to repel carp swimming upriver. one of those, with proper voltage and current limiting should be felt by an orca, but not harm the orca. A little experimentation will find a safe repellant level.

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Electric fish barriers generate really strong fields, using buildings' full of power electronics. They are surrounded by fences with prominent warning signs, and if you fall into the water I'm pretty sure you die.

So maybe something like this could be "switched on" temporarily -- run on batteries for a few minutes -- but you sure wouldn't want the boat to run with this on all the time. It probably wouldn't even be possible, energetically.

But yeah, electric eels do exist.

Maybe a big drum of capsaicin would be better.

Ideally you'd find a way to befriend them though. Some kind of carrot instead. Hm.

Small sailboats don’t have that much power available. 1000W solar, 6000 Wh batteries, and separate generator on medium size. Running AC is challenge away from shore for most boats.

You seem to be an order of magnitude away from what I consider normal for a small sailboat. 80W solar panel & 400Ah battery bank. Even the 'high output' alternator only puts out 70A max. Do people really need AC when away from shore? I lived in the Caribbean for years and never had it, its much cooler out on the water..

I follow cruisers and Youtube rich ones. Also, 6000Wh is 500Ah 12V batteries. AC is pretty rare on sailboats but does show up on nicer ones, but I get the impression nobody runs it except on shore power.

Also, when news say orcas are attacking small sailboats, I think they are comparing them to large yachts. And not actually small sailboats below 25'. I suspect most are 30-50' since that is most popular size for offshore.

BRB, passing these plans to the Orcas so they can start working on a work-around.

This is how the fins race starts

Use encryption and digital signatures. You might be subject to a fish-in-the-middle attack.

Orcas are a lot smarter than carp and appear to be doing this deliberately. It doesn't seem immediately obvious that causing these animals pain will prevent them from causing damage.

Pretty much all animals will avoid and deliberate action to avoid pain I think it's a reasonable assumption

Animals opt into pain-inducing behavior literally all the time. The question is just what reward is on the other side of that pain?

That is not true. Even humans work out, causing pain, but do so anyway because it makes the body stronger.

Muay Thai practitioners roll their shins and smack them against trees, causing pain.

Anxiety often induced animals to cause pain to themselves in the form of self-harm.

And so on and so forth.

orcas are really really big though (~6000lbs)? seems like this might not scale up… or if it did it might be deadly for smaller creatures?

Smaller, like people?

Speak for yourself!

Cattle prods might do the trick?

it's HN, second order effects are not important to the product

> some small current flow

Don’t do this on your boat. It will eat your propeller and every other metal object you’ve got underwater.

It might work with a small AC voltage that would not corrode. In addition, they would be used when the boat was under power/sail going somewhere.

In dock it will be off

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