iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

2005 Western Challenge
Battle Lake, Mn

Well, once again friday was the best day, and that wasn't too great. The ice was a big sheet of ice, but with an inch or more of snow on it -- it was too sticky for the very light breeze we had. There were only a few competitors that had the right runners to go in this sticky snow. Something about the cold temps, new ice, light sticky snow that made the regular runners very sticky. We never had any wind to get the fleet moving.

We had a great turn out of over 50 boats (54 was the latest count). It was epic in the fact that never before have we been skunked.. It's usually a very windy area.. but not this last weekend. The weather forecast was upped to 10-20mph for sunday, but it never happened.

I know the Minnesota iceboaters thank all the people that came from so far away, (europe, eastern region, central region) in helping to make it a fun time even without the wind. Thanks everybody for coming out west.

So we didn't even get one race in and we didn't even get to line up the fleet for a start. We did have a course setup, but even waiting till the last possible minute the wind wouldn't cooperate. We had split the fleet and we were all ready. Everybody tried hard to get some racing going. Lots of people went out and took their boats for a walk trying to see if we could sail.. but not many could get the boat going.

Thanks to John Peterson for being the primary race officer and helping us out.

Thanks to John Loomis for being the Regatta Chairman.

We were all excited to see how our local sailor Mark Christensen was going to do against the tuff competition because he had his boat setup and it was very slippery, we'll have to wait for the next time the top iceboaters meet.

think wind...
dnus5214