Ironically, the first time I experienced seasickness was after cackling with schadenfreude while layering smoked salmon and cream cheese on a bagel as our captain with 2 metal hooks for hands announced: "Seasickness is a state of the mind, but it comes out of your mouth." I've never liked smoked salmon since that day, and just the idea of seasickness makes a copper penny taste materialize in my mouth as if the Enterprise had beamed it there. I've tried just about every solution I could find with varying degrees of success, and had thought I'd found a solution using an earplug wadded into one ear + Dramamine recently, that is until the boat stopped for snorkeling and immediately began to roll around like Katamari Damacy. Watching the video above makes me wonder if that boat had been fitted with a Seakeeper, would I have still gotten sick?
Seakeepers apply the physics of gyroscopes to the age-old problem of boat roll. And while we're not the first to solve this problem with a gyroscope (large ships had large gyroscopes more than a century ago), we're the first to do it in a way that makes gyro stabilization a realistic option for everyday boaters.
So, how does it work?
Inside a vacuum-enclosed sphere, a steel flywheel spins at speeds of up to 9,750 rpm. When the boat rolls, the Seakeeper tilts fore and aft (precesses), producing a powerful gyroscopic torque to port and starboard that counteracts the boat roll.
How does a Seakeeper work? | Seakeeper
Every boat owner I've known gleefully co-signs on the statement: "a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into", so stopping that hole from rolling around like Tommy Callahan singing "Fat guy in a little coat" sounds like a brilliant idea to me.
