"FamilySailor" wrote in message ...
They were hanging limp alright. For quite a while. We would get an
immeasurable puff every now and then. I'm not too worried about convincing
you. I was there. You believing me or not changes nothing. What is, is what
is and what we did is what we did...
;-)

I certainly don't doubt that you were ... I've been there myself.


Winds were below 1 knot and we were making headway.

I'm curious, how do you measure that? The various annemometers I have stop
turning at speeds that low. Even smoke rising from a cigarette is close to
vertical when you go much below a knot.

I used the 0.1 knot just
as a number to post for my example. Oh, and the friction of the water
against the hull in nonexistant (zero), until the hull starts to move, then
you have friction.
So as we moved along slowly the friction slowed us as it
always does with all boats. But, unless the water is moving against the
forward motion of the hull, or is frozen solid, it will not hold your boat
stationary. That was a good one! Fluid motionless water holding a sailboat
stationary.......



I'm sure there is some component of friction that is not dependent on speed,
though it may be quite small. Its a little hard to find data for this, since it
has no commerical value.

However, I did say "in a practical situation," so it becomes fairly hard to show
that there's any motion on a 3 ton boat when there's only a few grams of force
(unless its in space). There are other problems - such as holding anything
like a proper sail shape, and leeway can be atrocious at very low speed. And
the rudder is effectively useless. Actually, if the wind was truely that low,
any rocking of the boat, or rudder motion would generate greater forces than the
wind.