Chickawaukie Ice Boat Club

6AM….Brenda’s honey-do list to me:

XXXXXXXXXXX (very important!)
YYYYYYYYYYY (long overdue!)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ (absolute must!)

and P.S., mister gluten-free retired person, cook a nice dinner for your working-class, and still-working wife……OR ELSE!….even my pre-caffinated brain could read between those lines….

…..chasened, I put on 16 items of clothing and headed for the swamp….temperature 8 degrees, sky clear…and there it was, at last: 4 solid inches of ice…..grey, slightly orange-peeled, with deep stress cracks lazily going here and there, and beautiful well-healed sunburst drain holes….and sun…now beginning to touch the far wooded hills….on with the nordic skates!….. scramble carefully into verticality…scrape-glide, scrape-glide ….the skater’s wind slowly builds….as those unique muscles relearn their jobs…

it seems there’s always one particular day, in each early-ice season, when….as Carol Cold and Willy Warm teeter-totter in the playground, bully Freddy Frigid puts his heavy foot on Carol’s end….and the game changes…..

back home, I revised my honey-do:

1. tell the world about the ice
2. rest and pray for wind
3. skate and skimbat on the swamp at noon
4. nap
5. skate in the wonderful late afternoon gloaming; skate right into the sunset
6. order a pizza

hmmm…. did I leave something out?

Just Checking

This morning I’m off to check the ice
though I’m darned if I know why
the mercury’s yoyo-ing madly
its numbers way too high

this house, though lovely, feels a cage
my work-out’s a deadly bore
and somehow I’ve simply got to know
what our beautiful swamp has in store

will this morning’s chilling 18 degrees
slow those frisky H-2-O’s
so a frustrated hundred and sixty pounds
can skate where it dreams to go?

but down at the swamp, the one-inch ice
sang it’s same-old song to me
and I sat at the edge like an ancient sage
there was no better place to be

with a sailor’s life-long instinct
I checked the swamp-edge reeds for wind
as the sun crept down and gladdened
the far-shore’s pines again

but the silence wasn’t quite total
or I’d hear the heart’s slow throb
there was the drone of commuters
heading to school or job

I thought of the decades that lay behind
when my routines well were bound
by deadline hustles and raising kids
and so rare was leisure found

so here I sit and I wonder
have these years a Buddha made
or only an old fart washed ashore
with body and mind a-fade?

Congratulations to Denis and Frank for their first sail with their new Whizzes! They weren’t gonna let a little snow and styrofoam keep them at home. He includes a nice montage of the building process, too:

http://youtu.be/pCKjbb9cvTE

These are the first Whizz to sail with the 8″ mast and it sure looks good to me!

Here in Maine, we’re building ice under a lousy surface on Plymouth Pond. Mid week warmth and rain should wet out and set us up for the weekend is the promised cold snap shows up. If not, we’ll al be coming to visit you, Denis!

In spite of everyone trying so hard to find a sympathetic forecast, the reality is that we are iceboaters and this is just one of those toughening-up exercises which helps prepare us for the real bummers later in the season when a blizzard covers a freshly scouted 4″ plate of black ice. Jim Gagnon had a look at Plymouth on yesterday and found 3″ of ice, snow covered. With the additional snow they got last night and not enough rain to wet it out and not enough cold to freeze it even if it did wet out leaves us on the beach, sad to say. Some of the water may drain off, but without a cold night the surface will be marginal.

No good news from Quebec, either. Denis reports: “Lac Abenakis is not sailable anymore (already). Patches of 1/2″ styrofoam and icy snow bumps. We may try petit Lac Lambton tomorrow, but we expect styrofoam there also. So, nothing very interesting here this weekend, and snow forecast for next week. We will have to wait for larger lakes to freeze, or for better conditions in Maine.”

A nice tip of the helmet to David Godine who flew over Plymouth yesterday and reports some open water at the east side, but pretty much solid evertwhere else. Perhaps he’ll adopt the Guegon Bros. technique of gently touching the ice with his landing gear to get a sense of the thickness. As far as I’ve heard, they never actually broke through. David?

The good news is that Tom Nichols new C Skeeter will be on the ice this winter:

And speaking of front seat skeeters, another one is taking shape at Iceboat Central. Building it helps take the edge off the long wait and false alarms:

The plan is to power it with a DN rig. Why? Why not? Anyone out there ready to move into a cockpit and take your DN gear with you? Much thanks to Tom Childs for donating the plywood, and the lousy weather for keeping my next job at bay.

Who knows what worry of the weather lurks in the hearts of iceboaters?

The Phantom does!