Ice sailing

How about a sailboat rig/rails for sailing on a frozen pond?

Anyone have any ideas or should we lobby  for a kit?

 

 


4 replies:

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RE: Ice sailing

Ooooo...how about a CLC Great South Bay Sooter?  Less likely to drown in the leads. <;-)

.....Michael

RE: Ice sailing

   Many years ago I tried windsurfing on ice with a buddy, putting skate blades on old skate boards. It was a blast but with windsurfing you get lift and with a good wind the board would lose contact with the ice. Fortunately we were smart enough to wear helmets, hockey pants and elbow pads.

RE: Ice sailing

   In the "back when" living in a rental place on Saratoga Lake, NY I too cobbled together a sled rig that mated with my windsurfer sail.  Used an old set of skis and 1 inch threaded iron plumbing pipe pieces to build a square platform (with wood deck) about 2 ft x 4 ft, with four 4" long pipe legs going down to pipe flanges.  Thru-bolted the flanges with countersunk screws to an old set of skis.  Discovered I needed skegs, so used some angle iron "folded" over the edge of the skis, with the edge tapered from front to back and sharpened.  Subsequently I've seen a somewhat-similar commercially produced contraption for sale.

The thing worked.  I did much better on very hardpack snow/white ice than hard clear ice or deeper snow.  I could only get about 90 degrees to the wind, and would always lose to sideslip, and broad reach was a much better point of sail it seemed, so after a number of tacks I'd have to walk the thing back up wind with a towrope.  And yes, like Snowbound indicates, between the upforce lift and the occassional slick ice patch you could often go from 30 kts forward motion to 20 kts sideways motion in a heartbeat.  And then the skegs would catch again and life would get really interesting.  Kind of like trying to windsurf while standing on one of those bar rodeo bulls with an eel tied to each foot - you get the picture.

But when the wind and snow were right, man was that thing fast.  I too recommend all the personal protective gear for anyone contemplating a similar pursuit.

The family had a home-built ice boat in Northern Lower Michigan when I was a kid.  Again, lake surface conditions were too often wrong with overflow or deep snow to make the thing very much fun on more than a few occasions.  I recommend against getting into the ice-boating game if you're not in an area where you typically get good conditions for the sport.

There is a whole (small) cadre of iceboaters out there in some select pockets of the country, many (most?) on homebuilt rigs.  Look them up.  As to a CLC design kit, I'm sure it could be done, but have no doubt the return on investment would not be there to make things commercially viable.  Of course CLC would be a great source for materials to built your own, but seeing as the iceboat needs to be quite strong and able to handle abuse (it WILL be capsized, flipped, cartwheeled down the lake, etc.) and doesn't spend its life IN the water, you can probably get by without expensive okume, etc. and in this day and age might consider aluminum or fiberglass/carbon mast/spars.

Trivia: Look at Perter Harken's (yeah, of Harken blocks/sailing hardware) history.  Iceboats were as much a part of his formative years as were the scows he sailed in Wisconsin.  I got to see his slideshow presentation when I took some of my young sailors to a BSA Sea Scouts Koch Cup regatta at the USCG Academy.  Very interesting - necessity is the mother of invention. https://www.harken.com/History-of-Small-Boat-Blocks/  

And if anyone found the red down vest that I laid on the ice (I got overheated with all the upwind hikes) in Saratoga in winter 1987 (?) that blew away never to be seen again, it is still the favorite I ever owned, so I still would like it back!

Good memories.

 

RE: Ice sailing

   Previous post by Bubblehead.  I think I sometimes spend so long typing (with interruptions) that I get logged out and end up with anonymous posts.  No big deal, but I thought Id go back and claim this one.

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