My friend and I went to a waterpark. Turns out 20kg affects physics.

Since it’s the second last day of the term at school, we all went to a waterpark. We had to stick with a person blah blah blah you know the story with schools and waterparks. I was with my friend, who we’ll call… Ev. I am a heavy boi, weighing in at 70kg. Ev on the other hand is 50kg. I’ll just go over some funny moments that were caused by this.

The trio

When Eskom decided to give us power, we went to the slides. The first 3 slides were right next to each other. The first slide we went on was pretty standard. Go on a floaty with 2 people, go around a few turns, and nothing to write home about Since the water was moving at a pretty decent pace, nothing interesting happened.

The second slide

The second slide in the trio was a bit more interesting. It was simpler than the first, but the issue was the water pressure was non-existent. For Ev, this was fine. His high acceleration and low drag meant he went down the side with 0 issues. It was slow, but it worked. For me however… Turns out the extra 20kg causes a lot of drag. I was stuck at the top of the slide and had to shuffle my way down a bit. It was absolutely hilarious for the both of us since I was just chilling at the top of the slide. However, once I get moving, I get shmovin’. This will be important later.

The Tornado/Trumpet/Just call it the FUNnel

The next interesting moment happened at the Trumpet.

However it was also called The Tornado in the description.

Except both of those names sucked so we called it the FUNnel.

It’s that type of slide where you go down a tube with 3 of your friends and you get yeeted into the funnel™️. I’m not the only heavyweight in my class, and we got 2 other people to go, one of them also being a bit on the heavy side. This is our first sighting of momentum.

Turns out 2 heavy bois going down a slide in front of 2 light bois makes us drag them down with us. We probably 1.5X’d the speed of the slide. We got yeeted into the funnel™️ at a speed that nearly made us hit the water jets near the top of the walls.

What a blast.

The race

After the funnel, we noticed a ride where it was 5 people going down a slide head first stomach down. Whoever got to the bottom first, won. A demonstration of acceleration vs. momentum, and how weight changes everything.

We all lined up for the race. Hearts not really pounding since there were no stakes. Ev got an extremely fast start, since his light weight meant he accelerated fast and was easily able to start moving due to low drag. I on the other hand, was a bit slower. I was able to get going but it took a bit longer. However, once I got going, I was gaining speed fast. The momentum carry allowed me to catch up to Ev and the rest extremely fast, coming second, to the other heavyboi. He got a better starting strategy which meant he only lagged behind slightly less than the lighter ones.

While Ev could accelerate fast, he couldn’t make that speed last. I on the other hand, could maintain and build up more speed when moving fast. My extra weight made gravity a lot more potent, leading to a higher acceleration than Ev could even dream of.

The final slide: The lazy river

Yeah, I know, it’s not a “slide”, but it’s still a funny story. Ev and I hopped into a floaty and went down the """river""". It was meant to be “calm” and “relaxing”, a perfect way to end the day. However, what we got instead what an excellent demonstration of physics and an chaotic ride of congestion and momentum.

Since the river was lazy, it was slow. This meant that Ev and I were not moving very fast, and the water was shallow. Turns out that leads to us getting stuck quite often due to my weight. Turns out having an unbalanced floaty isn’t super helpful.

However, this isn’t the end of the chaos. The lazy river has a few small drops to make sure you don’t loose all speed too fast (except we were since they did not plan for such a weight difference) and keep going. If I was in front during a drop, I would basically pull us down at the speed of light and we would have a huge speed boost. However, since the river wasn’t at a constant speed, and certain areas moved faster than others, the weight imbalance also caused us to turn right after, which made me slow down the floaty. This caused a hilarious ride where every since slope down was basically us trying to get me to the front and stop us from spinning around too quickly.

And let’s not forget the 2nd half of this: congestion. Turns how having many vehicles stuck on a single lane causes congestion, and a lot of it. This meant that we eventually hit a wall of floaties, and stopped all momentum. I had to paddle us forward using my hands. The water pressure was incredibly wack at that area which created a mini vortex-type thing where we just kept going around in circles for a solid 5 minutes, until we managed to push off another floaty, causing an unfortunate duo to take our place inside the vortex. What an absolute journey.

10/10 would demonstrate basic physics through water again.