So lets pretend I am on a river, and it has a current that is going 15 mph. If I tied my boat to the dock, let it get pulled till the line was tight and set my zero off for 15. Would the system try to accelerate me? The paddle wheel should in theory be going as fast as the current. So it should be happy I am going 15, even though my wakeboarder is not even out of the water.

consequently if I am going the other way, and I am traveling at 15 mph, and my zero off is set to 15, that paddle wheel should not actually be moving since the current is equal and opposite to my actual speed. So, zero off will be trying to speed me up. I would think my GPS speed would read around 30 mph, since I am losing 15 mph of readable speed with the paddle wheel.

I dont care how hard the system, motor or anything else is actually working, as long as my wakeboarder is going as fast as he would like.

So, obviously I am wrong here or they would not want everyone running a paddle wheel. But is this paddle wheel working in conjunction with the GPS to figure out how fast the current is? And at the end of the day why does it matter? if the boat needs to put more power down to travel 15 mph up the river, it will be travelling a true 15 mph relative to distance per hour. It will have no affect what the current on that river actually is. I still think that paddle wheel is not really doing us any favors here.

Can someone please explain where I am going wrong with this?

Also, sorry to hijack this thread.