Chickawaukie Ice Boat Club

This coming Thursday looks like the best chance we’ve had in a while. It hasn’t been scouted, but local sources confirm that the surface is hard as long as it’s cold. Forecast for Thursday is all that and more. Ice thickness still about three feet.

Just for a little context, this was taken on April 18, 2014.

There’s snow coming on Friday, but if it’s not much, or misses altogether then there could be a good opportunity of having a regatta. Lac St. Francois, just across the border in Quebec, looks about the same and if the snow misses there we might just de-camp. Bring passports. The CIBC held the 100 Mile Race there two years ago. Will lightening strike twice in the same place?

The plan is to sail out of Greenville Junction. We should be there by nine am. If you arrive later and find no one there, head to the Birches. It means that the launch is no good or the inner bay there is too beat up by snowmobiles and race cars.

And this is what the end of a fine day of spring sailing looks like.

Every now and then it’s a good idea to take your iceboat trailer for a ride just to make sure everything works, the bearings run cool and the tires hold air. So the run up to Pushaw wasn’t a total waste of time. It was great just to be on some ice again.

The launch is in excellent shape, and the smooth white surface extends to the horizon. Sadly, only the top layer of slush has frozen. The head of the ax returned a deep hollow sound. Under the frozen top there’s still six inches of water.

But under those six inches there’s still 24” of ice, measured through a recent fishing hole. Considering the amount of snow we’ve had this might be typical of what’s on other lakes still with tons of ice. Will the surface recover before it’s too late?

Rumor has it that Sunapee it in better shape, with only an inch of water under a good surface. Sunday night’s low temps might take care of that for Monday, but the wind forecast is light. Then starts a long spell of rain.
The search continues.

No photo, no idea how thick, but the surface was walk-on-reported to be hard and dry today. No water, no slush. Ice tight to the shore at Goulds Landing. Overnight temps marginal. After nearly a month without sailing this sounds pretty darn good so Mr Gagnon and I will have a look at it tomorrow and report. Sunday and Monday nights look colder, so our patience may be about to get rewarded.

The CIBC Spring Meeting is planned for Saturday, April 14 at the Damariscotta Lake Farm Inn. Bring some more of that amazing food that just keeps getting better and better every year. Business meeting at 11:00, pot luck lunch to follow. The bar will be open, which is not to say we will have an open bar…

We reserve the right to cancel at the last minute should there be a lake somewhere that desperately needs to be sailed. Moosehead, for example.

Bob Lombardo rode his bike across Pushaw yesterday and found about 15% of the surface to be hard slush ice. The rest was a thin dense snow. Rain later in the week might just do the job. He dug down a bit and found what we’ve been seeing in other places, like this core sample from Squam Lake in NH:

Further afield, the ISA has been called on again for next weekend in Gladstone, Michigan. The forecast looks excellent. I would encourage all who want one more epic sail for the season to bite the bullet and go. With so many hungry iceboaters out there it could be one of the best attended in years. Final confirmation at 1:00 EDT. on http://www.iceboat.org

Moosehead is getting more snow next weekend…

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!