haha, no zach it wasn't really dirty... i had absolutely nothing to do today so i went and bought some polish for it and washed the canoe and the car at a self car wash place (which is a terrible terrible place, they use your money so quickly and you have to keep putting more quarters in cause your cars covered in soap) so shit... i kinda already used car polish on the canoe, but it said it was for Fiberglass boats too.. I have always used polish just to clean it and halfheartedly believe that it makes the canoe faster, it at least makes it look nicer.. anyways, on to exploring roughness in a canoe..

Me and a friend did two years worth of research on the effect of dimples (as in a golfball) on hydrodynamic drag, which included 4 different boat designs and well over 1000 tests. The results were positive enough that we have been exploring the idea of a patent: the dimples significantly increased the speed in all hull types. Our second year of testing was related to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns; although normally related to economics it is useful in many other aspects. The law tells us that everything has an optimum performance level, more is not necessarily better.. normally it would be related to somthing like worker productivity, too many workers will reduce productivity, or a more common example is fertiliser in plants, too little is the same as using too much fertiliser, there will always be an optimum level somewhere in the middle. So using the law we knew that somewhere was an optimum coverage for the boat, before it would start to slow down... for our dimple size, and for our hull shape, we found the optimum number of dimples, but we know so little about the actual effects of the dimple that it is nearly impossible to find the perfect size and shape without years of testing..
a general roughening up of a canoe will increase the reynolds number which will.... do something (Keizo can help me out, cause i dont understand the reynolds number thing at all) All i remember about it is an example about throwing a ping pong ball.. try and throw one.. it goes then all of a sudden will fall.. when the reynolds number reaches a certain point the drag is too much for the object and it will drastically lose speed.. But i must be remembering something pretty wrong here, cause if increasing roughness increases the reynolds number.. then i would think it would more quickly reach that point where the drag overcomes it?? anyways.. so forget about the reynolds number
what i understand about the golfball is that normally air will flow straight over the sides, which makes the entire back of the ball have a lower (I'm pretty sure it's lower) pressure than the front, which causes nearly 50% of the drag. The dimple (somehow) holds the air to the ball longer, making it curve over the back nearly eliminating that low pressure area in the rear.. eliminating A LOT of the drag
In a boat it's incredibly different since it's not a circle.. but, a canoe does curve in at the rear and has a rocker... which makes you think that you could follow the same general principle, which you couldn't follow in a normal power boat, or a car (unless you dimpled the back windshield), or even really a plane.... but, i'm kinda guessing here, i dont really know whats happening (engineer keizo does, or will now soon)... only that the dimple has a very bright future, especially for outrigger canoeing