colors for visibility

Which colors show up best on the sea if you want to be seen? When I first bought a sea kayak my mentors said it was important to be visible and that the most visible colors lay in the red-orange-yellow range of the spectrum. I chose orange because that was right in the middle and ordered the kayak with orange deck and orange hull. I later decided I didn't really like looking at orange all day! Hence the next choice, still in the same range; a yellow deck with a red hull. But research shows that these colors while bright don't necessarily show up best. Red becomes less obvious in certain light...
White on the other hand reflects light so well it ought to be incredibly visible... except maybe when there are a lot of whitecaps out there? And black? Fishermen often find that black floats and black flags are easier to spot than brightly colored ones, especially when seen against the light...
Yet it's the unlikely "robin-egg blue" that surprises most paddlers. Because it contrasts sharply against most sea kayaking backgrounds it too is highly visible.
Of course big blocks of a single color show up better than broken shapes, hence the smaller blocks of color that effectively break up the outlines and camouflage war ships...
But when I spot a kayaker in the distance, it is often the movement of the paddle that catches my eye first, sometimes long before I can make out the kayak. For all the color you can add to the kayak, moving a paddle in the air is more likely to attract attention.

Fun with colors

A few years ago I wrote an article for Sea Kayaker Magazine about the psychology of color and how it relates to the color we choose for a kayak... especially the deck. I was interested because after I finished circumnavigating Iceland in a kayak with a yellow deck, I borrowed my then girlfriend's kayak which was identical but for the color (green deck) and felt very insecure on what was a choppy sea but certainly nothing I would normally worry about. I began asking other paddlers what color they preferred and why... and came up with some interesting results, enough to make some generalizations. Then recently I heard Mike from Portland Kayak Company saying he didn't like paddling the "green boat" and it reminded me of my earlier experience... and apparently his feeling about it had been similar to mine at the time.... has anyone else out there had a "color" experience???
So yellow is a "big" color, an "adventurous" color, where red, the color of flight, fright and fight is a more aggressive color. The color red makes not just humans but other animals ready for flight/fight by raising blood pressure and heart rate... dark blue having the opposite effect.