Denis and I were all packed and ready to roll to the ISA today, but it was postponed yet again. Conditions at the most favorable venue, Gladstone, Michigan (known also as Happy Rocks…) are an inch of styrofoam over a couple of feet of good ice. So I headed out to Damariscotta Lake to see what’s happening there. Access at Lake Farm is tricky, but twenty feet out there is an inch of syrofaom over sixteen inches of ice. The ice came up dry in the drill shavings. About fifty feet out there is four inches of snow over the same amount of ice, but the drill brought up slush, probably water seeping into the drill hole. Not a good sign.

The good news is that the surface looks fairly uniform, no holes. Will we get back on the ice? What will this immanent charge of weather leave us with? Will the soft spring nights and the joys of summer toys make dreams of iceboating melt away?

A little pond near the ocean on Mt. Desert was open water until last Sunday when Bob Lombardo followed a hunch and found that a couple of inches of fine black ice had just formed. It was not a suitable site for the ISA, even though the midwestern guys would have loved the view of the ocean from the leeward mark. It was just about big enough for two skaters and a SkimBat:

Thanks Bob. It takes a club to find the ice!