iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

Previous entries: Day-1, Day-2, Day-3, Day-4.

Today was something of a milestone. For the first time since the crash (two weeks ago, almost to the hour) there aren't any major "extra" pieces waiting to be glued back in place!

Previous entries: Day-1, Day-2, Day-3.

Today I glued up the final sideboard crack. However, while inspecting the glue-joint on the underside of the grab-rails, I noticed a crack in the epoxy across the bottom skin right at the forward mast-step bulkhead:

Previous entries: Day-1, Day-2.

The first step today was removing the clamps and masking tape from the "big crack" repair. A bit of work with the in-line sander followed by a few passes with the DA cleaned up the excess epoxy nicely. The joint looks good, and the sideboard is back mostly in one piece!

Day-1 of the project is described here, and the next installment is here.

Work kept me out of the shop Monday and Tuesday this week, and the 4-Lakes ice-boat club meeting kept me away on Wednesday. Finally on Thursday I was able to get working on the "big crack"...

The first step was to mask off everything but the wide areas of the main crack. The other splits and areas will be vacuum infused with glue later.

The next installment of the story is here.

I had a fairly serious collision in the first Silver-fleet race of the GC. Luckily, everybody walked away, but the boats weren't so lucky. Mine got away "lightly", with some major splits in the port side, a hole a bit forward, and a bent chock.  A quick look at the damage at Richard Wollam's shop that night showed there was too much to repair before the end of the regatta, so I accepted Richard and Julie's offer to use their spare hull for the rest of the regattas (Thanks again!).

    Well, they certainly are big and visible!

Many thanks to George for the easy ordering and quick turn-around from http://www.marketingacuity.com/iceboat/

I'd been busy with some other boat projects since the Great Western Challenge on Osakis, and I hadn't had a chance to do anything with my runners.  With sailing a real possibility in the next few days, and maybe even some regattas coming up soon, I decided to spend some quality time with the runner sharpener this afternoon and get all my runners "ready to go".

Hmmmm....

[This has been posted on the "DN America" site and iceboat.org, so apologies for the duplication. I'm looking to cast the widest possible net in hopes of getting this together for next season...]

I'm putting together a "loaner boat" around my old DN. Last year I got the hull and plank back in shape for Jori Lennon to use while her new hull was under-construction. That catalyzed an effort to assemble the rest of the parts for a complete program. My old Norton-Winder fiberglass mast should be nearly perfect for a beginner, and the Mattison/Krueger shop on Willy Street has donated some wire to make stays. Two years ago, Wayne Schmiedlin helped fix my spare boom to use with his new hull, and just yesterday I acquired a set of plate-runners from Eric Olsen of Milwaukee.

To the south, there was the main pits area for the NIYA:

      
(click "View Original" to see the full-size photo)

... and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses ...

Matt Struble's two throwouts in the NACRA F-17 North American Championship regtta were a third and first.

  'nuff said.

Cheers,

Geoff S.

More photos.

Skip Boston, DN US 150, passed away during the night of August 15, 2005.

A week ago a few of us visited Dan Hearn here in Madison to talk about building the 4-Lakes Jr. Iceboating Program. While we were there we got to see Dan's building jig. He designed it to be flexible enough to loft and build both full-size DNs and the Opti-DNs (or ice-Optis, if you prefer):
[image:1189]

After seeing his setup Byron Tetzlaff and I decided it was the way to go for our building plans. We may be building slightly different sized boats (min/max length, different cockpit widths, maybe even an Opti), so the flexibility of Dan's setup of screw-down blocks seemed ideal.

My personal measure for the "goodness" of spring (and fall, for that matter) is how long I have to wait between the last iceboating and the first soft-water sailing.

The sailing season is done (at least on the hardwater), so that means the building season is started!

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Yesterday we decided to get a couple of photos of our boats with the State Capitol building in the backround.