A DN regatta at Damariscotta Lake hosted by New England Ice Boat Association on Jan. 16. (Photo courtesy Bill Buchholz)
Picture yourself lying on your back, your head and shoulders propped up just enough to see over your toes, one hand on a line and the other on a tiller. It’s well below freezing, might be snowing. The wind is gusting. And you’re hurtling over a lake’s frozen surface, under sail, at a speed unattainable with any summertime sailboat. You glance up at your boat’s single sail, tugged tight by the wind. You’re a foot over the ice and you feel the three runners under your boat chatter and bump over every rut, snow clump, and pressure ridge because no lake’s ice is ever perfect.
But you’re not after perfection. You’re after speed.
You’re an ice boater.
Ice boats go way back. Four hundred years ago there were ice boats on canals in Holland. Two hundred years ago, Hudson River ice boats were up to 50-feet long, dwarfing the sleek modern, one-person, iceboats.
The “DN” class of ice boat is now the international standard for competition. The DN is so named because in 1937 Michigan’s Detroit News sponsored an ice boat design contest to come up with an ice boat that could be built at home. Remember, this was the Depression and money was tight.
A DN ice boat is simple: 12-feet long, with a 21-inch wide cockpit (3 inches wider than an economy airline seat), an 8-foot runner plank, a 16-foot mast carrying 60 square feet of sail. There’s a steering rod and the boat rides on three steel runner blades. A DN ice boat weighs about 100 lbs and is easily disassembled and trailered or roof-topped to any lake with good ice.
Recreational ice boats can hit speeds up to three times the actual wind speed. Find good ice on a lake in Maine with winds gusting up to 25 mph and your DN iceboat is faster than a state-of-the-art monohull on hydrofoils in the America’s Cup that might hit 60 mph.
How do you find good ice? Well, in Midcoast Maine, the best way is to get in touch with a community of active ice boaters, check out the excellent website hosted by the Chickawaukie Ice Boat Club (iceboat.me). It is chock full of current information, including ice cams, rules of the road, and reports on recent club sails and up-to-date plans for sailing at new locations. (“Chickawaukie” is a word for “sweet water” in the original Native American language.)
I had a great chat on the phone recently with Bill Buchholz, Chickawaukie’s president, who kindly filled me in on a sport that not many know about, but which is very much active. Bill reassured me that ice boating is thriving, in spite of the vagaries of climate and weather.
Some folks new to the sport might’ve been avid ice skaters, like Bill was when he was a kid, just looking for a new way to get out on the ice. Some hard-water boaters are also soft-water sailors, but Bill noted that some summer sailors’ bad habits have to change when they’re on the ice.
According to Bill, some ice boaters are pilots, who appreciate the fact that ice boating is basically flying over the ice – while you’re attached to an airplane wing. The physics are the same. And the wind is free. And, unlike summer sailing, the hull of an ice boat is almost unfettered by the friction of water.
In Maine, Bill says, there’s some ice boat racing, but it’s mostly cruising. When some of the 120 members of Chickawaukie gather on one of their favorite lakes, it’s as much about the wind and sailing as it is about camaraderie.
“Dammy,” as club members call Damariscotta Lake, happens to be one of their very favorite lakes (nearby Clary Lake is another), especially between the neck of the lake up near Camp Kieve and Damariscotta Mills in the south. The weekday I spoke with Bill, he said they’d had several boats up on Damariscotta Lake earlier that week. They love Damariscotta Lake because there’s no other lake like it for variety – the little islands and the narrow spots. And the wind.
Bill said even a good lake will present different conditions every time you’re out on it: Starting with the wind, of course. There’s also the snow: The wind might’ve cleared the ice of snow one day, but it might drift up the next day. The north end of Damariscotta Lake and the south end will freeze up differently. And the seasons differ.
Bill says some of the best ice boating on Damariscotta Lake might be in March some years, when the days are longer. You don’t need three feet of solid ice to sail on ice, but you don’t want mushy ice. Or thin ice. Too much snow slows you down and you can’t see thin ice. Or the pressure ridges.
Speaking of thin ice, Bill mentioned that ice boaters wear a helmet for protection (and their warmest layers and face protection against the wind). But they also carry with them “ice spikes” on a lanyard around their neck: If they were to find themselves in the water, ice spikes will enable the sailor to claw his or her way up onto solid ice before hypothermia sets in. But this is where the community of ice sailors is essential, providing reliable updates about ice conditions.
Bill says the ice on Damariscotta Lake is so good that it’s not uncommon to see ice boaters from all around New England out on the lake in March. Then, when Damariscotta’s ice starts to thaw, the most dedicated ice boaters head up to Moosehead Lake.
What’s the future of ice boating in the Midcoast? According to Bill, it’s growing. Many boaters are in their 50s and have the time to maintain their boats and time to drive to a good lake, but he says more younger people are taking to it now, not only for the speed, but because they just want to get outdoors.
Bill says he’s looking forward to post-COVID times when club members can gather at Damariscotta Lake Farm Inn up at the north end of the lake after a day out on the ice, when the restaurant reopens, to warm up with friends.
If you want to learn more about this hard water sport, watch this piece on YouTube (bit.ly/327y47B) then check out the Chickawaukie Club website at iceboat.me to find out where their next gathering is.
(And by the way, the club has a webcam on the north end of Damariscotta Lake, but is looking for a place to put a webcam on the south end of the lake. So if you have a place there, let Bill know.)
As for me, I’ll just close my eyes and pretend that I’m 10 years younger, hurtling down Damariscotta Lake faster than I ever imagined.
“Safe journey and always a handsbreadth of water (or a good 3 inches of ice) under your keel!”
(William Anthony is a member of the America’s Boating Club – Mid Coast Maine. He lives most of the year in Edgecomb on the Damariscotta River, whose waters he explores in a wooden boat built in Maine.)
