iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

This morning, (Wednesday) we left Traverse City at around 8:30 to go see if we were just going to pick up our boats off the ice, or if it was going to be a rescue mission. Everyone else had already taken their boat off the ice. Everyone wanted to get a early start over to oshkosh and with the deteriorating conditions some thought that there might not be any ice under the boats, hard to believe, I stuck my hand in the drain hole and there was 10" of ice., Yesterday we went back to the site to get the trailer off the ice, but the GTIYC guys had already done that for us by the time we arrived. So we just moved our boats to high ice ground.. We didn't know about the big drain holes out on the race course at the time.. After the awards ceremony the decision to leave torch was made, so everyone went back to torch and packed up their boats. We didn't. I took a nap, and ate, which turned out to be a pretty good thing, because we started the annual meeting at 8:20pm and ended at 11:50 or something like that, 4hrs..

So today when we arrived at Torch lake there were three boats on the ice...

We got the word about oshkosh when we were only about 10 miles south of Marquette. We turned around and went out on the ice and found Mike D. Mike was gracious and let JD take his new boat out for a ride to check the ice, of course we also took the suburban out to show JD where the good ice was.. pretty cool driving all over the bay. Mike wanted to show us the good launch site, close to the good ice so we left the boat, piled into the suburban and mike ripped us over to the launch site at about 60mph.. it's smoother when you get up to speed..

Launch site is the Red Arrow Park out on the point in Marinette, Wisconsin.

The good ice is about 1mile out, of course you could drive out there, if you wanted, even accoss the shipping cheanel.. see above to know how I know..

If we get the regatta in by Saturday we should do an offshore race around the island here... it would be about 3.5 miles out to the island and then another mile around it, so probably about a 10 mile race... maybe twice around..

The ice is smoother then pepin last year, a little coblestoney.. but it will continue to smooth out into the night, and it should be pretty hard tomorrow morning.. so it's going to be pretty good.. and I think we'll be able to get a long course in.

I'll try to put up a post after racing tomorrow.

I'll even try to get the camera onto the boat tomorrow for a race, if I can.