>For those of you that don’t know it I wrote these down after riding with
>Joe M on the Muddy Muni Weekend
>
>Number Description Characteristics
>0 Dry Tyre not wet, perhaps dusty
>1 Slight Damp Tyre not dusty
>2 Damp Tyre glistens
>3 Slight Mud Tyre has light mud coating
>4 Moderate Mud Tyre has definite mud coating
>5 Definitely Muddy Off- road tires a necessity
>6 Slight Gloop Occasional sliding
>7 Moderate Gloop Inconvenient to ride in
>8 Definitely Gloopy Riding becomes difficult
>9 Slight Stiction Frame begins to clog
>10 Moderate Stiction Frame clogs quickly - hard to pedal -
>Only mud masters still
>riding
>11 Really Sticky Almost impossible to pedal.
>12+ Swamp Not even Mr Marshall can ride!
That’s great! I may get to use these in notes about my rides. I was
wondering though about the + in 12+, it implies that it can never get
wetter than swamp. But riding under water (that’s not unheard of, or
it wouldn’t appear in the Unicycle Fanatic Test) is not Swamp for
sure?
Klaas Bil
The pupil of an octopus’s or goat’s eye is rectangular.
Well, mud is a mixture of dirt and water, so as long as there is some dirt present, you could consider it muddy. That’s like saying space is a vacuum, when it technically contains a very thin dispersion of particulate matter - not to mention planets and stars.
I would normally defer to your greater experience and knowledge, but on this occasion, as a one-time keen scuba diver I have to tell you you are very wrong indeed. Picture mud you can stick your arm into and not reach anything solid, then you pull your arm out and realise you can no longer see far enough to read your depth gauge. Then you rise a few feet above the bottom of the lake, and the clouds of silt hang there below you like they are solid objects. Then when you come out of the lake, your wetsuit needs hosing down… Oh boy, it can be muddy under water. Yes indeedy.
I am still haunted by experiences of canoeing in the local canal (the Fossdyke, for those of a Lincolnshire / Nottinghamshire persuasion)… the mud at the bottom goes down further than you dare stick your foot, and releases thick, black clouds into the water. Stinks something rotten, too…
yes ok I know. I’m a dinghy sailor and windsurfer too so I know it’s muddy at the bottom. But it’s not muddy the rest of the way down though which was the point. It’s like saying the ground is really hot because there’s molten rock underneath it.
Besides I think it can almost count as swamp, after-all swamps can be quite deep.
I think the main problem with riding through water is not the mud at the bottom - I’ve found it’s usually not very thick, just slippy, which can be countered by going fast - but the fact that you can’t see the surface you’re riding on.
If you blast through it at high speed sod’s law says you’ll hit a bump and go flying; if you go slowly and carefully you’ll either stall or slip.
Plus the psychological barriers caused by not wanting to have to put your foot down in half a foot of water…
I’ve ridden a bike through water enough so that my handle bars are under water. I rode out a sandy bar about 200 meters into burrard inlet in vancouver. As long as the bottom is firm you can still pedal, but you get slower and slower. Eventually the bike’s bouyancy makes it difficult to ride and nearly impossible to start from a dead stop.
It was a hoot, but I had to get my bike completely overhauled because salt got into everything.
Re: Re: My new ride a 700c special and the marshall mud factor
> muddy at the bottom. But it’s not muddy the rest of the way down though
> which was the point. It’s like saying the ground is really hot because
> there’s molten rock underneath it.
Not exactly, since you are actually cycling on the bottom. The water is
irrelevant
until bouyancy takes over. I don’t think that would happen until after the
seat was
submerged. (Not in my case anyhow )
The deep undisturbed water-logged ooze at the bottom of a clear puddle, lake
or
stream must surely qualify as 12+ mud. So far the lakes and rivers I’ve
cycled into
had sandy bottoms, and they were hard enough.
Riding fast seems to get me through mud. I have a 26 x 2.6 gazz on my MUni, and nothing really stops me.
Mind, my dad dont really speed through puddles. He is a bit more frightened sometimes as he does not have the conferdence that I do when out on our MUnis, which is quite funny sometimes watching him fall off in the mud, bless him!
Sometimes there are little bumps which you cant see, but standing up a little, so you legs can absorb the impact does just the trick!
And also. I love my tyre (26 x 2.6 gazz) but is there much difference between the 2.6 and the 3"? I know the 3inch looks more like the dogs, but is there really much difference?
Re: My new ride a 700c special and the marshall mud factor
phil wrote:
> Arnold the Aardvark wrote:
>>So far the lakes and rivers I’ve cycled into had sandy bottoms, and
>>they were hard enough.
>
> Ummm… this does of course beg the question of why you were cycling
> into a lake in the first place…
Er, I thought you’d met Alan?
Anyways, I can confirm that he has indeed ridden into lakes. I have no
information as to how sandy his bottom was at the time.
Regards,
Mark.
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