June 26, 2023 – Windermere, Cumbria
We are going to miss the World Stone Skimming Championships, which is a tragedy. The competition happens in September this year, at Easdale Lake, Scotland, long after we have gone home.
There are two elements to the sport:
- Skipping: How many times a stone will bounce. (88 is the current world record)
- Skimming: How far a skipping stone will travel before it sinks.
Lake Windermere has been the site of several skipping and skimming championships. In 2018, Dougie Isaacs of Scotland set a world record here, at 121.8m. (For perspective, that is almost exactly the length of two hockey rinks!)
While we are visiting Windermere, I have been learning the rules, practicing my pitch, and gathering flat circular stones hoping to get a crack at the championship.
So far, I have achieved 11 skips and about 25 meters. I am 78 skips and 100 meters away from a world champion, but still trying.
There is a great deal of physics involved in achieving a world record stone skip:
Lift, torque, gyroscopic effect, angular momentum, distorted pendulum, precession, axis of rotation, gravity, surface tension, kinetic energy, and angular impulse are all involved. There is also a dynamic principal called Coulomb Friction at work on a skipping stone. CF goes by the formula;
Which is meaningless to me, and mildly obscene.
Stone skipping is practiced worldwide and is called many names. In England it is “Ducks and Drakes”.
The Japanese call stone skipping, “Mizu Kiri” (water cutting). In Bangladesh it is “Frog Jumps”, and in Bulgaria simply “Frogs”.
The Catalan people put an interesting label on skipping stones, “fer passers” which translates as “Making Step Stone Bridges”.
The Czechs have several names for skipping, including “To Throw Froggies” and “To Ferry Virgin Mary”. Hungarians refer to skipping as, “Make it Waddle like a Duck”.
In Nigeria “The Way a Dragonfly Skips Across the Water” describes stone skipping. Norwegians “Bounce Fish”, and the Finns “Throw a Sandwich”.
Only in the Middle East does stone skipping turn warlike and political, Iranians call it “Syrian Bashing”.
There are a lot of ways to describe skipping stones across water. My personal favourite is the name the Polish apply to it …
… “Letting the Ducks Out.”
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