Ice Yachts for Thrill Seekers – Part 1
THRILLS, in variety and number not to be experienced anywhere else, can be found aboard an ice-yacht, with enough breeze to give about sixty miles an hour on spurts where the going is good. So says a veteran American designer of ice-boats; and, he considerately adds, there is little or no danger in the sport, for “statistics show that accidents are negligible as compared with those of other sports.” When you start an ice-boat, the speed momentarily increases. “You sit in a shallow, oval cockpit,” the writer, H. Percy Ashley, explains. “Your right hand firmly grips the tiller, your sheet tender is beside you on your right. You are off to outsail the very wind. The shore that you have left recedes with the speed of an express train, and the opposite shore rushes toward you. A slight turn of the tiller brings you about in a long easy curve, and with lifted forerunner you shoot away on the other tack.” As for the speed actually attained, Mr. Ashley writes in The Open Road (Boston):
A modern, up-to-date ice-yacht will make at least sixty miles an hour’under favorable circumstances, but on short spurts only. Notwithstanding the wild yarns that appear in print the really official time for a straight course of twenty miles (to windward and return) was made by the big Wolverine, carrying 836 square feet of sail, at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in forty minutes flat. The actual distance sailed was about thirty-two miles.
An ice-boat has made nine miles in six and three-fourths minutes on one leg of the course on the Hudson River, and Captain Lash Price with the Claril made a mile in thirty-seven seconds during a gale at Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1909, but he says he does not wish to do it again, as he did not get over the sensation for a week. Altho these items were not taken under racing committees, and hence are not official, there is no doubt that they are correct.
If you wish to have every nerve thrilled, try a spin over the ice on one of those flyers of the frozen surface. I have constantly been with racing ice-yachts for the past thirty years, yet I still retain that thrill in sailing them or in seeing a race.
We know nothing definite about the construction of the first ice-boat, says the writer. It is possible, he suggests, that one of the Pilgrim Fathers, to lessen the labor of shoving his loaded hand-sled over the ice, utilized an old square sail and a favorable breeze. It is said that sleighs propelled by sails were used on the Great Lakes in Canada during the French and Indian war to move English troops and provisions. We also know, he continued, that:
On the Hudson during the days of the old Dutch settlers a water sailboat on runners was used to carry sheep across the river to keep them from slipping on the ice and breaking their legs.
The first authentic ice-boat was built on the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie by Edward Southwick in 1833. She was in the form of a triangle, with sides about fifteen feet long. The two front runners were ordinary skates screwed to this frame; a flooring was nailed on the three boards that framed the triangle; and she carried a small spritsail.
In 1845 Simmon Wheeler, also of Poughkeepsie, made an ice-boat similar to South-wick’s but more elaborate, and used runners with shoes made of pot-metal. These runners were preserved and I saw them a few years ago. In 1866 three ice-boats made the trip from Poughkeepsie to Albany on the ice, a distance of about sixty miles, which created much comment throughout the country. The boats were Haze, Snow-flake and Minnehaha. The leading papers even in Europe and as far as Honolulu devoted much space to this exploit, and the skippers of the craft received letters from all parts of the world asking about the construction, speed and sailing of their boats.
This, of course, gave a great boom to iceboats, and many were built along the Hudson and the Shrewsbury River of New Jersey. Well do I remember as a boy those old big boats (about three times the size of present racing ice-yachts) of the vintage of 1880. They were equipped with side-bars and all were sloop-rigged. They made as much noise as an old railroad train, and in a blow they scuttled sideways. A heavy puff of wind on a bit of smooth ice would set them spinning like a top. In those days we did not know the meaning of making the center of sail effort agree with the center of hull balance, a problem that must be applied to the design of every practical iceboat to insure correct guidance.
As time progressed scientific drafting, coupled with practical experience, evolved the highly perfected racing ice-yacht that we now have. The old style of ice-boats, which were in the form of a cross with side timbers running from the stern to the runner plank, gave place to boats that are still built in the form of a cross, but with wire side-stays and oval cock-pits.
The great change in construction took place at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., in 1880. Herman Relay, of that place, a pilot on one of the river steamers, had a 500-square-foot ice-yacht, called the Robert Scott. While he was sailing on the ice of the Hudson River,
one of the side-bars broke. The accident happened near the railroad track, and the workmen offered him a coil of telegraph wire to repair his boat. He removed the broken bar and in its place laced several strands of wire from stern to runner-plank and, by inserting a stick and twisting the wire managed to make the construction solid. He was surprized, on the way home, to find that the boat sailed much faster when it was tacking in such a way that the mended side carried most of the strain. On reaching home, he rerigged his boat with wires on both sides instead of the former cross-beams, tightening the arrangement with turn-buckles. The boat thus rigged easily outsailed larger boats which had formerly been more speedy. In the end, the accident resulted in a revolution in the construction of ice-boats, with wire in the place of the heavy beams. Other improvements, most of them tending toward greater lightness of construction, followed. The writer was responsible for the making of the first hollow backbone for an ice-yacht, by which the weight of this important timber was reduced in a large ice-yacht, from 840 to 490 pounds. However, he tells us:
Very few large ice-yachts are now being built. Aside from the expense of building them, they require thick ice and are difficult to remove or unrig quickly. The smaller boats, carrying from 150 to 350 square feet of sail, can be put on and off the ice quickly and can sail on ice of half the thickness that the large ones need. An up-to-date racing ice-yacht, carrying 350 square feet of sail, with hollow backbone and spars, steel rigging and Tobin bronze fittings, all of the best, costs, say $1,250. A few years ago the price was just half what it is to-day. But of course you can build any kind of boat your pocket will allow. About twenty years ago I made a table of time allowance for a mixed class, which was adopted officially throughout the world, and a few years afterwards I classified iceboats for racing as follows:
Class A 600 square feet of sail area and over.
Class B 500-600 square feet of sail.
Class C 450-500 square feet of sail.
Class D 400-450 square feet of sail. .
Class E 350-400 square feet of sail.
Class F 300-350 square feet of sail.
Class G 250-300 square feet of sail.
Class H 200-250 square feet of sail.
Class I 150-200 square feet of sail.
The best all-around boats, in my opinion, belong to class F, of 300 square feet. But in New Jersey every racing boat is built to class E. Western boats are built to classes A, C and G. In Boston and vicinity boats are built to classes F and G.
Source: Outlook, 2 January 1929
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