>>However, if you will note, in my reply to Terry, I said that a couple of my
>>criticisms of a Mesopotamian flood would be molified if the ark landed in
>>Iran. But such a flood still could not last a year. Mine can.
>
>Fair enough. The way the account is written, with specific numbers of days
>for each phase, it seems natural to estimate the length of the flood in the
>neighborhood of a year. So if it was a continuous flood, then Noah would
>have ended up in the Persian Gulf in the Mesopotamian flood scenario,
>_assuming_ the flooding was continuous. However, Noah had probably boarded
>up all the hatches, couldn't see out, and was unlikely to open them unless
>it seemed quiet for some period of time. If the waters rose and fell and
>the ark grounded frequently, with heavy rains and storms coming
>intemittently, your 3-5 mph estimate might be quite high. Noah wouldn't
>have known whether it was safe to exit, since he woulnd't have opened any
>hatches until it had been quiet outside (no thunder, no rain on the roof,
>no boat motions) for long enough that he felt safe.
I would suggest that one can tell if the boat is grounded. There is a huge
noise when the bottom of a boat hits the submerged object, the boat motion
which you had been feeling for a long time suddently ceases. You are no
longer bobbing up and down. This would cause me to want to find out what
happened, and thus I would have opened a window to see.
One other issue. if one uses repeated groundings to slow the boats flow to
the sea, there is the issue of how much wear and tear the wooden bottom of
the boat could handle without being broken. A sharp rock can rip the bottom
of any wooden ship. The repeated stresses of resting on a small point or
line across the middle part of the ark can produce stresses which can open
seams along the sides. Once a seam is opened, the ship will sink.
<PRE>
force force
| Stress |
V V V
_________________
|--ark----------------------|
|----------------------------|
^
rock or sand bar
300 cubit long ark
(The archive will tak out all the spaces so if you are reading this there,
the carot below the ark is above the r in "or" The stress and V above are
above the carot and the force is downward at each end of the ark.)
</PRE>
In short, I do not think that grounding a wooden boat repeatedly is good for
its structural integrity.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm