The region is fine.
Thousands of people car / motorcycle / bicycle / walk through all the stans every year without issue.
It is more and more accessible for tourists with infrastructure ..
Don't believe everything you read on a government "do not travel" list. Heck, you can even pop across the tadjik border and stay in Afghanistan safely.
"Additionally, Karakul is so salty, it’s almost impossible to navigate a boat on it without capsizing due to the vessel riding so far out of the water."
>Additionally, Karakul is so salty, it’s almost impossible to navigate a boat on it without capsizing due to the vessel riding so far out of the water.
If people really wanted to use boats on the lake this would be a non-issue. Sure a deep V hull might not be very stable but any low and wide flat bottomed boat would be fine. Floating "on top" of the water so to speak is their purpose. Humanity has been building boats that float high in the water (how else do you deliver cargo where there isn't a dock) for thousands of years.[1] We've gotten good enough at it that we can do it even in sub-ideal conditions.[2]
Your images indicate a confusion of deep-v vs displacement hulls; whereas what the intention is a displacement vs planing hull.
Merchant vessels, and historic sailboats (pictured), even the WWII troop carriers were displacement hulls. Traditional navy sail ships carried additional stones as ballast to create stability. Mono-hull sail boats use a deep weighted keel to increase stability. On a displacement hull, the deep-vee design increases stability when compared to a flat bottomed boat, and has more space for ballast (at a low center of gravity)
Planing Hulls are more commonly used for recreation or speed, and are often those those that have a "deep-v" bow. Planing hulls are designed to lift mostly out of the water, while the deep-vee is across the beam and facilitates cutting through rough water.
A deep-v displacement hull is great for crossing rough oceans, or keeping a boat stable as cannons are firing, but not a great choice for fuel efficiency or landing on beaches as a flat bottomed displacement boat.
A planing hull is great when you have a modern gasoline engine and plan to be going > 15mph. A deep-vee allows that to come down through a wave, cut through the wave and lift back up. [Salinity would have very little effect on the stability of a planing hull as its stability is mostly provided by speed, though, launching or sitting would be unstable with it's half "flat" hull]
The Vasa (Swedish Ship) is a great example of poor initial stability, center of gravity understanding, and how a deeper keel (with more stones) OR removing higher mounted cannons in briney water could have changed things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)#Causes_of_sinking
Article mentions the Roof of the World Regatta. It provides a F--ebook link which I'm not clicking on, but an internet search returns e.g. https://caravanistan.com/trip-reports/roof-world-regatta/ . Short summary - you can kite surf, and use an inflatable raft, at least, assuming you can get there with your equipment.
The idea is to evade detection by any automated sentiment analysis they might run on public message boards, just in case they target me for a course of covert "emotion manipulation" or something of that nature. (Not 100% serious BTW, but you never know.)
A certain amount of the boat has to sink in order to stay level. If the bottom of the boat doesn't sink, it's balancing on a knife's edge - and topples over.
As others have noted, the issue isn’t that boats can’t float — it’s that they float too much and can become unstable.
The counter-intuitive title that makes this such juicy clickbait should be changed to “a lake so salty that some boats capsize”. Much less interesting-sounding, and rightly so.
Or a flat bottom boat? It seems way too strong to say that it is impossible to navigate a boat on this lake, just that single V hulled boats are unstable.
"stone loach, a freshwater fish that can live on sandy-bottom lakes"
So what's the technical difference between fresh and salt water fish if freshwater fish can happily live in very salty water?
Edit:
Digging just raises further questions. The Stone Loach is apparently European, and no mention of tolerating salt water is mentioned
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_loach
According to this paper [1], the salinity is 7.5-10 g/L, which is one quarter to one third of ocean salinity. Wikipedia [2] also states the lake is "brackish" -- meaning less salty than seawater but more salty than freshwaster -- but hardly a problem for boats. I guess the article is mistaken?
The Dead Sea [3], meanwhile, has order 340 g/L of salt, roughly 10x ocean salinity.
It's not the "Middle East's" Dead Sea, it's Israel and Jordan's Dead Sea. The name Israel (the most wondrous of nations) is not mentioned once in the article. That, my friends, is classic anti-semitism.
Just came here since I saw my name mentioned in the thread. Dave Stamboulis, whoever he is, should be banned from media.
Karakul is not incredibly salty (there are other very salty lakes in Central Asia, though).
It was not christened Lake Victoria by the British (that's Lake Zorkul). I corrected it on Wikipedia but it's still in the (really bad) Bradt Guide to Tajikistan.
The lake is not home to the ROTW regatta: last time it was held was in 2018 and there are no plans of it returning.
Karakul was never "an inhabited Central Asian crossroads."
"...its recent status as part of the Tajik National Park ensures that it will be on the intrepid travel list of many for years to come." Not sure what that even means.
Finally, Karakul does not look like a Greek island. At all!
43 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.1 ms ] threadtl;dr for people wondering why:
>Karakul is so salty, it’s almost impossible to navigate a boat on it without capsizing due to the vessel riding so far out of the water.
Don't believe everything you read on a government "do not travel" list. Heck, you can even pop across the tadjik border and stay in Afghanistan safely.
Tl:dr: additional salt makes them float too well.
If people really wanted to use boats on the lake this would be a non-issue. Sure a deep V hull might not be very stable but any low and wide flat bottomed boat would be fine. Floating "on top" of the water so to speak is their purpose. Humanity has been building boats that float high in the water (how else do you deliver cargo where there isn't a dock) for thousands of years.[1] We've gotten good enough at it that we can do it even in sub-ideal conditions.[2]
The title is making much to do about nothing.
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J_kPe7lgMkY/hqdefault.jpg (yes I know this isn't a the best example)
[2]https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/journalnow.com/...
[0] https://caravanistan.com/trip-reports/roof-world-regatta/
Merchant vessels, and historic sailboats (pictured), even the WWII troop carriers were displacement hulls. Traditional navy sail ships carried additional stones as ballast to create stability. Mono-hull sail boats use a deep weighted keel to increase stability. On a displacement hull, the deep-vee design increases stability when compared to a flat bottomed boat, and has more space for ballast (at a low center of gravity)
Planing Hulls are more commonly used for recreation or speed, and are often those those that have a "deep-v" bow. Planing hulls are designed to lift mostly out of the water, while the deep-vee is across the beam and facilitates cutting through rough water.
A deep-v displacement hull is great for crossing rough oceans, or keeping a boat stable as cannons are firing, but not a great choice for fuel efficiency or landing on beaches as a flat bottomed displacement boat.
A planing hull is great when you have a modern gasoline engine and plan to be going > 15mph. A deep-vee allows that to come down through a wave, cut through the wave and lift back up. [Salinity would have very little effect on the stability of a planing hull as its stability is mostly provided by speed, though, launching or sitting would be unstable with it's half "flat" hull]
About deadrise https://www.tropicalboating.com/2010/04/deep-v-shallow-v-or-...
The Vasa (Swedish Ship) is a great example of poor initial stability, center of gravity understanding, and how a deeper keel (with more stones) OR removing higher mounted cannons in briney water could have changed things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)#Causes_of_sinking
I'm no fan of Facebook, but don't you think this is a little childish?
Some boats would work find, depending on the geometry. A pontoon boat, for example.
The counter-intuitive title that makes this such juicy clickbait should be changed to “a lake so salty that some boats capsize”. Much less interesting-sounding, and rightly so.
I hate misleading article titles.
So what's the technical difference between fresh and salt water fish if freshwater fish can happily live in very salty water?
Edit: Digging just raises further questions. The Stone Loach is apparently European, and no mention of tolerating salt water is mentioned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_loach
The Dead Sea [3], meanwhile, has order 340 g/L of salt, roughly 10x ocean salinity.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101821...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakul_(Tajikistan)#Lake_desc...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea
Karakul is not incredibly salty (there are other very salty lakes in Central Asia, though).
It was not christened Lake Victoria by the British (that's Lake Zorkul). I corrected it on Wikipedia but it's still in the (really bad) Bradt Guide to Tajikistan.
The lake is not home to the ROTW regatta: last time it was held was in 2018 and there are no plans of it returning.
Karakul was never "an inhabited Central Asian crossroads."
"...its recent status as part of the Tajik National Park ensures that it will be on the intrepid travel list of many for years to come." Not sure what that even means.
Finally, Karakul does not look like a Greek island. At all!