Stone skipping

The Guinness World Record for the furthest distance skimmed using natural stone stands at 121.8m for men, established by Dougie Isaacs (Scotland), and 52.5m for women, thrown by Nina Luginbuhl (Switzerland).

The next official NASSA World Championship is expected to be held at Platja d'en Ros beach in Cadaqués, Catalonia, Spain.

A stone skimming championship takes place every year in Easdale, Scotland, where relative distance counts as opposed to the number of skips, as tends to be the case outside of the US.

Japan holds competitions where both skimming and skipping principles, as well as a throw's overall aesthetic quality, are taken into account to determine the winners.

[4] Instead, the stones are a flying wing akin to a planing boat or Frisbee, generating lift from a body angled upwards and a high horizontal speed.

The result is a characteristic bouncing or skipping motion, in which a series of extremely brief collisions with the water appear to support the stone.

That torque is stabilized by the gyroscope effect: the stone-skipper imparts a perpendicular initial angular momentum much larger than the collisional impulse, so that the latter induces only a small precession in the axis of rotation.

Conversely, a stone making angle 20° with the water's surface may rebound even at relatively low velocities, as well as minimizing the time and energy spent in the following collision.

[17][19] Experiments suggest that initial angular momentum's stabilizing effect limits most stones: even "long-lived" throws still have high translational velocities when they finally sink.