On swimmer’s strategies in various currents

Abstract

Finding an optimum strategy to reach a certain destination by swimming in a background flow is an interesting question which leads to non-trivial results and swimming paths. Here we consider different strategies for various types of surface currents, including parallel currents, and currents resulting from spring sources, and sinks. Swimmers may instinctively swim toward the destination point. It turns out that this idea may not lead to the desired result in the presence of the background current. We will show in some cases the best strategy is to swim towards a certain point other than the actual destination. A different strategy may be to obtain the path of the least time and then follow the minimized path. We study this alternative strategy, too.