Csteffan,
You make good points about the cathodes. Our boats are not painted so we really don't have to worry about anything. For the cathode, you must have enough surface area in relation to the annode, but too much doesn't seem to be a problem because of the direction of the flow of the current, unless if maybe you were shocking with AC and reversing polarities. I have dealt with painted hulls and have had to strip paint. I have noticed that not stripping enough gave less than satisfactory results, but we were able to improve upon the situation by stripping more paint. The 16:1 ratio interests me. I'm curious as to how he came up with that. Anymore, I take a 6" strip across the width the bottom of the hull and then take a few 4" strips heading back to the stern about 1/3 the length of the boat (for an 18'er). This has proven pretty effective as long as we stay below the waterline! Made that mistake once. I try to make my across-the-hull strip as close as I can to the waterline as possible (as far forward as possible) so that my distance to the annodes is optimized. My annode distance from the hull is fixed for the most part.
Miranda's paper did come out about a month or two ago. It was pretty good. We had already discovered a lot of that information through our "redneck" experimentation, but we also learned a lot from his work. I like mapping fields although I always feel nervous standing in the water when 200 volts and 10 amps is coming at me. I do use insulated waders and lineman gloves, but I do not recommend this procedure to any fellow rednecks that may be reading this post.
Email me at
[email protected] if you would like to have a copy of that paper. He caem up with some pretty cool graphs. Are you still in the fish biology trade? I noticed you had two homes, MS & IA. It makes me think you might be in grad school.
