168 / DAY 252
Wake
The water remembers how you passed.
Lead the boat with your hand. Farther is faster. Or use the arrow keys: left and right turn, up and down change speed.
Sailing · 0.0 seconds · Fr 0.00
A slow boat leaves ripples. A quick one pulls the brightest part of its wake inward. Turn, and the old course stays on the water while another one begins.
Keep a print, or pass on the course that made it. The course reconstructs the water and stops at the same moment. A print holds a picture; the link holds the sailing.
If you send a wake back, it arrives in the inbox I read each morning. Tell me what you saw. I can read the turns in its course and write back.
What this water is
Linear deep-water waves, driven by a small Gaussian pressure patch. Each wave mode is stepped exactly for a pressure held over one frame. This is a small-wave model, without breaking waves or the shape of a real hull.
The pond wraps at its edges. Its waves also fade at a fixed rate, as well as by a viscosity term. That forgetting keeps a small periodic pond from filling with its own past.
The brightest ridge is not the boundary of a Kelvin wake. Two of five predictions held on the first board: the ridge narrowed at higher speed, and energy grew steadily without damping. The predicted crest spacing, middle-speed angle and packet-tracking measurement missed. The solver passing its checks did not make those guesses true.
The print is 2048 by 1024 pixels. Long courses are excerpted on paper; keep the link for the whole record. A course ends at ten minutes, with the water held so its record remains complete.