Summon Jetski II: how much can a squid tow?

[Murph.]

At last night's session, my Oracle, trying to retrieve an item from deep water, used Summon Monster II to get a squid, grabbed hold, and had the squid tow him to the bottom and back up with its 240ft "jet" speed.

My GM lets me get away with a lot (obviously), but I like to come up with "real" rules before trying things a second time, so how should this have worked, if at all?

I'm guessing this would need a Handle Animal "push" to get the squid to play along, and some sort of strength check on my PC's part to hold on -- assuming those, what kind of speed can I expect here?

Squid's strength 15 means my rather waifish elf is a medium load, even in armor, which would knock the squid's jet speed from 240 down to a still ludicrous 160ft under standard load rules. Is this any kind of a reasonable way to handle this?

[Titania, the Summer Queen]

Your summoning special squids. You tell them celestially what you want. Swimming down and up is not a big deal. They will do it no problem. If you can't speak to them, you have a problem, they will only attack your enemies at that point.

[Mudfoot]

240' per round is 60' per second is 18m/s is 45mph. Water-skiing generally happens at speeds of around 30 mph, and it's pretty much impossible to hold on to the rope if you fall in - the drag is too much.

Looking at the physics, we have a nonlaminar (turbulent) flow in an incompressible medium. So we'll use the standard drag equation. Assume the skinny elf druid is a smooth cylinder 25cm across and 2m long (arms above head) and we get a drag force of 0.5 x 1000 x 18^2 x 1/4^2 x 0.8 N = 8100N, which is equivalent to trying to lift 825kg. Not gonna happen. For one thing, he'll pull the tentacles off the squid.

Working backwards and assuming the druid (and, more importantly, the swimming squid) can hold a static 30kg = 300N we get a maximum speed of 8 mph or 45' per round. And a very tired squid.

[Murph.]

I appreciate any answer that considers nonlaminar flows, though I was primarily wondering about options within the rules of Pathfinder, not nature. :p

...But what if my PC casts several instances of air bubble on his person and his gear, in order to form a more torpedo-like profile?

[Torbyne]

Adding large buoyant areas to your towing package doesnt seem like a good idea. Though again, this is pathfinder and i dont think air bubble actually has rules for added buoyancy.

I am going to second Titania's comment, it has the astriks of celestiality on the table plus "If you can communicate with the creature, you can direct it not to attack, to attack particular enemies, or to perform other actions." so just tell it what you want.

[Mudfoot]

RAW, it doesn't say. Smoothing himself out can indeed reduce the drag very considerably, allowing maybe 3 or 4 times the speed. It's not clear whether Air Bubble would do this, or tend to break up. It doesn't give any protection, implying that it's in no useful way impervious to water beyond normal movement speeds. I expect you'd get cavitation and a stream of bubbles behind the druid.

There's still the issue of how towing such an item would affect the squid. They're molluscs, so have no conventional skeleton. Pulling on the tentacles like that would distort it and probably make it very hard to jet in the normal manner.

I see a research paper in this. Take a conventional squid, such as Lepidoteuthis Grimaldii, tie various neutral-buoyancy objects to its tentacles or arms, scare it and measure its speed. Fun for all the family.