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Iceboating
| Article
# : |
12789 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
1,814 Words |
| Author
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Kathleen Prentice
Kathleen Prentice is a free-lance writer whose articles appear
in the Detroit Free Press. |
The water is perfect: below freezing, dry, and snowless with a brisk wind to fill the sails. The waterway is sealed with several inches of new, black ice.
Skimming gracefully over the gloss of ice at 60-100 mph, iceboat sailors lie prone along their crafts' hulls, only inches above the frozen surface. The pressure of the steel blades melts the ice into a thin film of water, lubricating the passage of the runners and moving the cutter along three to four times faster than the wind itself. The silver winter shore is a silent, motionless stage for the shifting sails, clacking blades, and fleet of hulls bending and hiking to the wind's whim.
Iceboating is a sport, a hobby, a consuming passion that spans continents and centuries. In the days of Hans Brinker, the seventeenth-century Dutch folklore character, vessels were fitted with runners to move cargo along the frozen canals. Two hundred years later, descendants of Dutch settlers cruised the Hudson River stern steering gliders, unfurling a thousand square feet of sail to race the landbound New York Central express streamliners. In 1937 a contest sponsored by The Detroit News produce a twelve-foot, single sail "DN" craft that was so portable that it revolutionized the sport. Today over seven thousand ice-boats skim the frozen waterways in the United States and several thousand counterparts travel the European iceways.
Williams Bay on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, is considered by many to be the iceboat capital of the world, hosting both the World Championships and the North American races this year. National Iceboat Authority board member Jane Pegel first rode the wind along the Lake Geneva ice "forty-one winters ago." She says her father thought it would be a good sport for her. Four decades later, she's still at it - organizing international races, chairing iceboat club meetings, and experimenting with adjusting her glider's runners to increase her speed. She and her husband, Bob, also build skeeter iceboats and sell DN parts.
Late in December the ice starts to move down Lake Geneva. After an entire month of bitter cold, a four- to eight-inch block of new black ice locks in the bay's surface. Jane Pegel is one of the official ice checkers who skims the bay on skates on watch for holes in the block kept open by flocks of geese and ducks. She can tell when the ice is ready. Word travels fast and boats are hauled out of garages, barns, from underneath sheets of canvas where they were tucked at the end of the season, last spring.
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