Chickawaukie Ice Boat Club

A sunset stroll on the snows of Lake Chickawaukee. Last night’s snow fall was 6 inches of dry snow with a brief rain at the end. The result is that there is a loose open styrofoam crust, not icy, that should keep tomorrow’s NW wind from drifting. The rough stuff from last week is filled in, the ground swell is still apparent. The surface is smooth with rounded pock marks from the rain, sort of like a great big thick pancake that is ready to turn over or gigantic small pox/acne scarring. Snow is 8 inches deep in places.

Foot Note # 2 If you use the Bean’s toe warmers for just a couple of hours, for shovelling snow perhaps, and peel them off your sock and put them back in their envelope and seal with masking tape they will hibernate all day and when exposed to air again get warm for your late day outing. Cool no? Warm yes.

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David Godin sent in this report on Feb 20 at 5PM:

Just received the report from upstate NY friends who flew back home from our place today. Lake Champlain snowed covered do not know the depth.
Cayuga lake in the finger lakes froze over earlier this week, it’s 30 miles long with great wind, A touch and go was done by Rob Kinyoun in his ski equipped Cessna 180 30 minutes ago. They have a handful of ice boaters there.

Jory

P.S. I hope everyone is enjoying our 4 lovely seasons this year: Almost Winter; Winter; Still Winter, and Road Construction.

Ramblin’ Roger has been sailing. Last week in Ohio just North of Columbus, 4 days of sailing. Our weather went South.

This week’s venue is Miles River in Easton MD, site of Nationals after rest of the country got snowed out in mid ’80’s in a cold white winter like this one. Upper Chesapeake Bay is frozen, the whole bay froze then. Five inches of salt ice being rained on now (same storm we have here) with deep cold forecast for tomorrow and a few days. Should be good fresh water ice on salt ice, sort of like case hardening of steel. Miles river was the birthplace of “Think Ice” courtesy of Jan and Meade Gougeon. So stop grumbling and feeling sorry for ourselves. The ice is somewhere, all we have to do is drive on cheap gas and sail.

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Nine Lockley Skimmers duked it out around the marks on Great Pond yesterday. Bobby Able reports that the conditions were fine, with a good breeze, and the boats were zipping along beautifully. The snow seen in the photo below is scheduled to be wet out Sunday, followed by cold temps all week. They are also watching one of the large bays on the North Fork, not far from the New London ferry dock. It has 6″ of hard black ice today, bound to be improved Sunday. A dash of fresh water over salt ice really improves the surface. One way ticket from New London, car and driver: $55.oo. With trailer a lot more.

Two feet of black ice (fisherman report and hole observation) with the same 6 inches of slush on top as last week except now the top 2 inches are frozen into snow ice to form a “slushwich”. Will the slushwich ever freeze solid with the 2-6 inches of snow on top. It has been zero every night for at least a week and around 10 during the day. The R value of snow is very high.

The rough surface and breaking waves of drifts has changed to hard wind packed drifts, often rounded and intervening choppy soft ripples. The wind has been howling for days. It has to get warmer, it has to rain sometime unless Karaktoa blows up again to give us 12 months of frost and drive people out of Maine again.

Foot Note: LL Bean toe warmers are better than the competition. They show placement either under the toes OR ON TOP of toes. I have noticed that they don’t seem very warm under the toes, they do indeed work much better on top in recent days of snow shoeing. Very likely they get more oxygen on top, oxygen is needed to support the oxidation (rusting) of the powdered iron, catalysed by salt, that makes them warm. My toes stay warmer than the rest of the foot, wonderful. Beans sells them, and hand warmers, in bulk boxes.

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