Chickawaukie Ice Boat Club

According to Paul Zucco, iceboats have been featured on the cover of WoodenBoat magazine six times since it’s founding. A little research into the long row on the top shelf confirmed this, and Doug Raymond was kind enough to throw in the missing issue.

The first issue was #14 in 1977. The cover girl was Freddie Krause’s COLD WAVE, and the article by Peter Burckmyer featured and interview with some of the Hudson river Lawrence family members. It’s all about the gaff riggers, fitting for the time when the magazine was all about pine tar and hemp. They clipped artwork from S. Calhoun Smith’s fabulous book “Iceboating”, probably at that time still in print. Find it if you can.

Then came the DN’s in #86, 1989. Joe Norton is interviewed and tells a good story about the boat’s development, state of the art and the future. He predicts exactly how Jeff Kent and others have come to use wood as just one part of a composite structure. WoodenBoat has started with it’s love-hate relationship with epoxy.

#92, one year later, takes us back to tradition with the South Bay Scooter. I don’t believe the Scooter folks had started building in fiberglass yet, but this is a terrific article, quite long by WB standards. There’s even a photo of puddle jumping, but I still can’t imagine how the sail generates enough horsepower to get the boat from the water up onto the ice.

Dan Clapp is the next cover boy in an early bubble boat in #110, 1993. WB is now all about high tech wood/epoxy composites and what a great boat with which to demonstrate it. On the cover, he’s passing Peter Harken in a rumble seat skeeter. That type always had difficulty getting the balance correct enough to actually steer, so the boats by Clapp and Tom Nichols dominated for quite a few years. Tom tells a great story of racing with the guys from the mid-west on Lake Champlain and the Easterners are just walking away from the mid-westerner’s rumble seaters. They called Buddy Melges back in Wisconsin asking him what they should do, but Buddy wouldn’t accept that his guys were getting beaten so badly by such an unusual design and just told them to try harder! The rest is history.

WoodenBoat #182, 2005 comes home to Maine to tell us about L.F. Herreschoff’s SLIPPER. She’s an early fuselage type stern-steerer with a marconi rig. Great photos by Dickie Saltonstall on a beautiful day on Lake Sebago illustrate Bill Bunting’s story, and there is a nice sidebar by Lloyd Roberts. Plans are featured, so you’ll be able to build one for yourself if so motivated. It is iceboat building season, after all. SLIPPER was seen sailing on the Hudson this season, but we hope to see her back in Maine someday, too.

And another fuselage stern-steerer with a big steering wheel is the most recent, this past January. Great photos were taken by Alison Langly that day in 2013 just in case some one might do an article on the Monotype. Bunting twisted my arm pretty hard to get me to write it; I owe it all to him, thanks Bill. The funniest thing, though, is that the photo at the head of the story prominently shows a hole in her starboard quarter. It looks like a bullet hole, and if you squint just right you can imagine that it’s actually a Sopwith Camel you’re looking at, just back from a flight behind German lines. But no, her mooring thawed out in a southerly gale and she swung around impaling herself on another boat’s runner. Another reason to remove your runners at night.

Think Ice!

After a hard day in the shop, they go outside and sit by the lake for a sundowner.

Thanks Denis and Frank for this shot, and thanks also to Jeff Kent for allowing the teeming masses into his shop while there was real work going on this past Saturday.

Treasurer Roberts received twenty dollars in the mail, presumably for a CIBC membership. But there was no return address and no contact info in the envelope. The post mark was from Maryland. We’d like to credit this person with membership, so if anyone knows who this could be, or if this is you, please contact us.

Don’t forget about the NEIYA Spring meeting/clinic at Jeff Kent’s Composite Solutions shop this coming Saturday at 1:00. We all need to take one last gulp of iceboat air as we go under for the off season!

8 am saturday….impossible to leave the bed’s cocoon….the shoulders, knees, elbows: each placed just so, to avoid pain…..how to make it down to the magic of toast and tea and Advil?….but the memories….how the body now smiles….luxuriates…Buchholz says there are four cornerstones to iceboating. WIND….how it powers and drives you thru yesterday’s dense bonded snow drifts which covered 10% of the lake…accellerating on the grey, braking on the white. ICE….the dozens of varieties: scollups, pinnicles, caverns, yet magically all so smooth and undangerous…. BUDDIES….our wonderful collection of nutcases, whom we enjoy, bear with, and love….and SCENERY….and here….here…. there is simply no word, no possible concept, to apply to yesterday.

Moosehead is 75K acres….Winniepasaukee 46K…..Sebago 30K….Moosehead is so vast, so mountain-bounded, and so dominated in its center by a dramatic brick-shaped mound, Mount Kineo….. that when you glimpse it driving from the South, you can’t believe your eyes….this is a fairy kingdom…. Yet driving 3 hours due north on April 17 seemed such a long shot. As we loaded the car Thursday afternoon, I warned the strong sun: Don’t kybosh our Ice!…..what hubris….the tilt of the earth was against me…ice was melting willy-nilly at breakneck speed…..local lakes were water…..Plymouth, and hour north was half-and-half, its central plate soon to come unmoored and ricochet to death against the shores. At 2 hours the ice looked solid but puddled at the edges…and at 3 hours, reaching Moosehead, we had ice bonded to the shores. Walking out, at the Greenville ramp, the snow drifts were daunting….my spirits fell….

But 10 miles further north at Rockwood, the drifts were fewer and shallower….we scouted a good launch plan, and then began searching for dinner…..two restaurants were closed, one rattled your dentures with “music”, and we settled down with thankful relief, to wrap sandwiches at a pizza joint….by now die-hard Curtis had joined our duo…..later a cozy motel….a sunny dawn….a great breakfast, eaten without hurry in the calm morning air….and then we swung by the Greenville ramp again and goggled at massive 4WD king-cab trucks, pulling glistening enclosed trailers, disgorging shiny new snowmobiles, shepharded by beautifully high-tech-clad humanoids…wow!…no kneeling in Good-Friday churches for this lot…….nor us, of course.

Soon Denis joined us after a 2 hour drive south from Quebec and we five helped each other set-up in the light SE wind….out on the ice at last, it was great sailing to windward in the 7 MPH airs, but tricky working downwind….the Bills switched to slush runners while the wind slowly built and by 10AM it was absolutely glorious on any sort of runner…the 1″ snow or slush, either hard in the morning or softened in the afternoon was backed by smooth solid ice…

We explored, we snacked, we match-raced at every chance….we hiked lingeringly before imaginary cameras, backed by the drama of Mt. Kineo….we gathered here and there, now and then, in the blazing sun, to compare notes…..everything was so new to me….never have I sailed such vastness….never sailed a surface which looked so dodgy, but was so smooth in reality…and by 3PM, with arthritis now shouting to some, we again worked as a team to wade boat parts thru the slush and pack our trailers 100 yards away….

will there be more?…..sated for now, we imagined this being a fabulous ending….but i’ll wager….i’ll just bet…that if we keep oogling Greenville’s weather….and see two cold mornings in a row in the next two weeks…..these laboratory rats might just pull lever “A” one more time…and hope those tasty food pellets slide down the chute…..