Name: なぜ「水切り」の世界記録保持者になれたのか？本人が解説 | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-03T09:05:35.000Z
Duration: 9 min 53 s
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How many times have you ever seen one stone skip?  This dud is my best throw ever.

Adverbs of manner

The most I ever skipped verified was 88 times, and that currently is the standing world record for about the last 10 years.

Meet Kurt Steiner, a world champion, Guinness World Record holder, and master of the physics of stone skipping.

Stone skipping is not big enough to support anybody's lifestyle, even mine.

It's a labor of love and a hobby passion.

I entered my first tournament in 2000, and that's kind of where I got serious about it.

Kind of stuck with me for the last 20, 25 years.

And it's caught some people's attention, including Wired Ourselves in 2019.

And every time Kurt goes to throw, he has to consider five things.

The faster you throw it, the more speed it has.

The spin is how fast the rock is spinning.

You can change how fast it's spinning by your delivery and how you hold the stone as well.

The tilt angle, if this is the front, then the tilt angle is how much of this you add to the stone.

The attack angle is from where you let go to where it hits the water.

The twist angle is like the roll in an airplane, and it plays into distance throwing and wind conditions.

Interestingly enough, when it comes to a lot of the numbers, I'm not the guy who pays attention to it.

When I come up to the shore to throw a stone, the three things I'm looking at are the wind direction.

The breeze from behind helps so you can release it more horizontally.

The water surface, there's no real pattern in it.

The most you have is a kind of random distribution of tips.

They can actually keep the rock riding up on the water.

And the other thing you look at is your footing.

So, I've fallen in, broke my kneecap, all kinds of, yeah.

If your plant foot goes, you're just out of control.

So I'm using a set of thin, light rocks, and I'm going to throw in what I call a whip delivery.

I will be pulling down and then driving up against that as I torque, and that'll snap my hand out.

I'm going to be trying to land close and get a dense skip pattern here.

Something to that effect, if you can see it.

What happened there was my twist was a little bit off.

I came in with a little too much of this angle and it bit the water instead of skipping off the back edge.

So now I probably didn't land, but 10 feet out in front of me.

So now I'm going to switch up to a little heavier stone, but I'm going to be throwing more horizontally across my body.

This gives you a little more velocity and a little more depth.

As a caveat, I will say I'm still in physical therapy from shoulder surgery, so don't tell my doctor.

At the core of it, to me, stone skipping is really just an appeal to get outside.

A lot of people know it, but don't do it because they don't think they have the time.

I think what's not understood is how impressive it can be when it's taken above the level of a picnic.

A simple thing through a mastery becomes a really visual, spiritual kind of art form.

This is where I get most of my stones, southeast shore of Lake Erie.

Lots of shale on the cliffs, they fall out, they get polished up, they make skipping sirens.

Look how flat that surface is compared to the rest here.

So the next thing I want to do is flip it over and hope it's still good, and it is.

So right there, we have the makings of a really good rock.

This edge right here is not too aggressive.

It's not so sharp that if I drag my finger on it, it'll hurt me.

This stone demonstrates sharp versus soft.

My terms, but it happens to have split so that the top surface here is rounded and the other side has a very sharp transition from the face to the side.

So if I were throwing in rougher water, I might consider throwing the soft side down because it can kind of run over those ripples a little more efficiently, like a bigger tire wheel.

However, any truly sharp stone is a bit of a slot machine, right?

Because even a millimeter of a water ripple looks huge to the stone.

This is oversized, but I just happened to see this.

If this was a skipping stone, you see this lobe here and you see how this angle here is a sharper angle than from here around this way.

If you think of that like the tooth of a saw, if it's spinning this way, it's going to bite more.

If it were spinning this way, it's what I would call feathering.

If I was right-handed, this is perfect because the tip is following my natural spin.

But if I was left-handed, now I'm spinning it this way and it's going to bite.

So you can always convert a rock from right-handed to left-handed by flipping it over.

The problem is sometimes the bottom surface isn't the one you want down.

I think the most prestigious stone skipping requires you to learn why you want a stone.

And that means you need to be able to select from infinite variety and know how to predict what it's going to do based on your experience and your understanding of the mechanics of it.

You know, if I had to pick which side is up, I would want to go this way, but if I do, it's got a tooth.

If you were in a boat and you stuck your hand down, that's kind of what this edge is going to do.

Every time it comes around, it's going to grab the water.

I have some correspondence with some pretty high power physicists, and I swear I have told them some things that they actually kind of frowned at me at.

I don't want to toot my own horn, but I believe that there are certain things I discovered in stone skipping behavior or object skipping that, you know, other people come out and say, look what we discovered.

Kurt's understanding of the physics of stone skipping led him to the world record and also a year's long rivalry.

Most of the stone skipping now kind of picks up around 2013-ish.

But for 10, 12 years before that, Russ Byers and I were also kind of having this go round.

So back in 2000, we were in the same tournament.

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なぜ「水切り」の世界記録保持者になれたのか？本人が解説 | WIRED Japan

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