Fastest long-distance boats in the World?
Open Waterbike prototype performancesCan we really develop the fastest long-distance pedal boat in the World?
Well, waterbikes are pretty close.
Here is an exaple
An early prototype of the Open Waterbike won the long distance race at the World Championship, back in 1999.
In the following years we set up a program for a scientific evaluation of the waterbike performance, in collaboration with the University of Udine, Italy. 
In the picture you can see one of the athletes who partecipated to the experiments.
The face mask she wears is connected to a portatile metabolimeter, measuring her oxygen consumption and other metabolic parameters, while a SRM powermeter measured the output power and a GSM the speed performance. The tests were performed by a research team led by professor Paola Zamparo and including Luca Plaino and Barbara Sgalmuzzo.
The results of our tests were finally published by The Journal of Sports Sciences. (Zamparo, P. et. al, Energy balance of locomotion with pedal-driven watercraft , Journal of Sports Sciences, Volume 26, Issue 1 January 2008 , pages 75 – 81) The overall results of the tests are exposed in this diagram.
Metabolic power input as a function of speed for different watercrafts
Source: Zamparo et al, 2008
As you can see this waterbike at her cruise speed almost as efficient as the fastest Olympic crafts.
Faster and more efficient waterbikes are already been built and are under further developing an testing: have a look at them.
We are pretty close, and together we can get there.
Please contact us to learn more
Our boat si faster than mine