Editor's Column

by Benjamin Tertin

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Iceboat's Maiden Voyage
Gets Gnarly

With frozen toes, frostbit fingers and the fearless grit of a fighter pilot, I tightened down my hat's earflaps and wiggled my goggles from side to side.

The goggles probably didn't need wiggling, but that seemed like something a true iceboat captain might do.

Blinding sun ricocheted off the lake's glass-smooth ice, forcing me to squint. A north wind caught my sail, the runner blades cut into the ice, and I started gaining speed.

One year earlier, I had seen my first iceboat during one of Dad's after-church joyrides out onto the frozen Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.

With Mom's finger nails digging into his arm, she howled "No! Don't go out there! Jim!" and Dad floored the Izuzu Trooper's gas pedal.

"Hang on, honey," he said, grinning, "and roll that window down so you don't drown in the car if this baby breaks through." My sister, Christy, and I were already hanging out the windows, smiling big and holding our heads to keep our stocking caps from flying away.

Lake Geneva's shores were blurring past when a fire-red shark fin caught my eye. That "fin" was the 30-foot-high sail of a 50-foot-long iceboat called a Skeeter. Then I noticed more of the curious contraptions gliding across the ice, each with a large sail rising from a horizontal torpedo-shaped body mounted to a wide frame supporting three sharp blades.

The Skeeter, I later learned, is the largest and fastest boat on the ice, able to achieve speeds in excess of 100 mph. Smaller iceboats, most popular in North America and Europe, have flexible masts reaching 16 feet and are usually constructed with a carbon composite. Still, these vessels haul along at five times the wind speed.

I hadn't realized I was living on the "ice belt"--a region between 40 and 50 degrees north latitude. There, temperatures cool enough for water to freeze several inches thick before snow cover. North of that, the snow is too deep to iceboat.

Even considering my geographical good fortune, reasonable hopes to captain a Skeeter never developed. Knowing a paper boy's salary could never support the costs of the fiberglass sheeting, carbon composite needed to build an aerodynamic ice torpedo, I wrote the sport off as a hobby for the grown-ups.

Then I found a simple iceboat design in my trusty "American Boy's Handibook" that called for pine lumber and steel pipe instead of carbon fiber and titanium tubes. I was stoked.

I salvaged two bent steel pipes for the rudder handle, used one-inch planks from the local lumberyard scrap bin for the boat's frame and borrowed Dad's camouflage tarp for a triangular sail. The backyard woods sacrificed a small maple tree for the 7-foot mast, and the downtown Goodwill provided runners -- blades carefully pried off secondhand women's figure skates.

I would have been smarter to use hockey-skate blades, but they cost too much.

My iceboat was no Skeeter, but the T-shaped design looked mean. Two ice-skate blades supported the wide crossbar that my feet rested upon, and I sat on the long perpendicular center beam in front of the rudder skate.

Encouraged by a mirror sheen on Brown's Lake's first ice and gusts from a hefty north wind, I set out for my debut cruise.

"Goggles adjusted; check," I said out loud to myself. "Knots tight; check. Captain ready; check."

A hollow scraping sound echoed through the boards as the blades carved three parallel stripes across the lake's surface. My almost-instant high speed had me believing the maiden voyage would be a major success. But I continued going faster.

Stinging snowflakes pelted my cheeks. The ice below blurred past. The maple mast started cracking under the strain, and I was officially racing out of control.

But the figure skates' characteristic front-side jagged teeth, called "toe picks," snagged a crack and dug into the ice.

My sweet iceboat halted and snapped through the air like the kill-bar on a mousetrap. My face pounded against the ice. I was out cold.

I regained consciousness in the splintered wreckage of a completely destroyed iceboat.

Wiping blood from my eyes, I mumbled, "Dang, should've used the hockey skate blades."

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