History Blog
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I would like to open this discussion in true amateur fashion by stating flatly that the ice boat is a ridiculously simple affair, and that, in nine races out of ten, the only significant difference between the first boat and the last is either better runners, better sails, better controls or, most common of all, a better skipper. I would add that excellence in all these four essentials is relatively easy to attain — with the possible exception of excellence in the matter of sails. Sailmaking is a fine art, and ice boat sailmaking is a specialty within that art. Nevertheless, an understanding of what a sail really is, and of how it works, will enable you to do wonders for the sail you have without having to dent the budget for a new one. One of the grand things about any kind of sailing is that the ability to write fat checks never made a sailor, and the wise old ‘horny-handed’s boys who build their own and patch their sails can still bring ’em home in front — because they know what makes ’em tick. To start with the broadest of generalities, every ice boat is essentially a framework mounted on runners and propelled by sails. Her speed, unhampered by any appreciable resistance, is more like that of a small airplane than that of a sail boat. Hence, it is reasonable to suspect that there is more food for thought in the airplane field than in that of the sail boat when we get into matters of design.
By and large, the general conclusion ran pretty close to the most obvious one: that, somehow or other, the reversed hull, with rudder forward and runner plank aft, was the key to the situation. Pinned down to paper and pencil, some of these theories were a bit weird. Here and there amid the tumult and the shouting was heard a still, small voice saying: ‘Forget about the d—- bow rudder for a while and take a good, long look at the rig.” … The Europeans insisted that the secret of the new boats’ amazing speed lay in their modern, efficient and powerful rigs. They pointed out that tiny little sails of only 75 square feet area on these boats were generating enough power to carry two men as well as the boat at speeds far above those of the older and far bigger boats. They also pointed out that heretofore no boat with less than 125 square feet of sail had ever been more than an impractical toy, with no performance rating whatsoever. That this raised a storm of dissension is putting it mildly, for not only did these newcomers run rings around us and make us feel distinctly old-fashioned and helpless, but they all sported that shameless and unscientific cat rig! Let us here continue to delve into the problem of designing a proper rig for our ice boat in the light of the fast, off-the-bow, air current that seems to be what she normally has to work with. On the ice, courses are seldom held for more than a few seconds; wind direction and velocity are constantly shifting. There is no time for delicate sheet trimming. With a one-sail rig, it is possible, by hard work and a quick hand, to keep all the canvas constantly drawing. But with a sloop rig, the wind in the jib is going to do just one of three possible things: (a) help to drive the boat; (b) backwind the mainsail because trimmed too flat (killing the drive in the big sail); (c) luff because not trimmed flat enough, upsetting the air flow to the mainsail and surely doing nothing to increase progress. It is interesting to note here that the generally unsatisfactory behavior of ice boat jibs was well known to the pioneers of the sport along the Hudson River in the seventies and eighties of the last century. They tried the cat rig, complete with enormous mast and heavy gaff, all stepped on the backbone, well forward of the runner plank so as to bring the C.E. (Center of Effort) up by the main runners and away from the rudder. The results are not hard to imagine: One after another of these juggernauts took a quick run to windward, all very fine, turned gracefully around the weather mark, caught the breeze from the quarter, lifted her rear end off the ice and went berserk. The final wind-up was sometimes a quick spin in mid-river, with the crew sliding off gaily over the ice. But more often than not it was a sickening crash as the whole works tried vainly to rearrange the solid rock ballast of the Hudson River Railroad. In the early 1880’s, Charles and William Merritt, of the little village of Chelsea, on the Hudson River, designed and built the first successful lateen-rigged ice boat. Her single sail, triangular in shape, was bent to two long slender spars, called “boom” and “gaff,” respectively, from their relative positions when hoisted. The C.E. was well forward, away from the rudder, and yet there was no heavy mast out on the nose of the boat to overbalance her and lift the rudder off the ice — the bugbear of the cat rigs of that day. Results were as they should have been — highly successful. After one season of scaring the daylights out of far bigger sloop-rigged boats, she was bought by Commodore John E. Roosevelt, uncle of President Roosevelt, and one of the greatest of all ice boat fans. He named her Eugene and for many years she sailed with the Hyde Park fleet. Later, she was sold and renamed Vixen, under which rakish title she still races regularly as the flagship of the Orange Lake Ice Yacht Club. Other lateens followed immediately but the sloop rig was still in favor with the famous builder and designer, Jacob Buckhout, of Poughkeepsie, who, with his son George, built most of this country’s successful ice yachts until quite recent years. The Buckhouts turned the ice boat into the ice yacht, refined and perfected their basic sloop-rigged design until their products completely swept the field. In so doing, they swept the lateen rig, which had benefited from no such refinement, into the discard. Had the Buckhouts worked on either the cat or the lateen with similar persistence, they would, without a doubt, have arrived at the highly successful cat-rigged type now almost universal in Europe; an extremely light, hollow mast and Marconi rig to cut down nose-weight, and an exceptionally long backbone, extending several feet abaft the main boom, to keep the rudder on the ice and minimize spinning. But they stuck to the sloop, which thereafter remained the accepted rig until that fatal day when some “crazy Westerner" stuck a cat rig onto a reverse-English hull that steered from the front like Sister Susie’s tricycle — and, zowie! the apple cart was not only upside down — it was demolished. When the wind is light, the larger boats carry enough sail to get them going, and speeds are not so great that skin friction and form resistance on hull and spars are major retarding factors. Hence, the big ones should — and do — win the races when the breeze is light. But, when it breezes up, the smallest racing class of all can — and does — show a clean pair of heels (and a taut, unflapping sail) to her bigger sisters handicapped by too much canvas. Even if they don smaller sails, they cannot hide their larger and bulkier hulls, or their taller masts, with resultant greater resistance, and the little ones gaily zip around and pass them with maddening consistency. A most interesting case in point was this year’s Open Championship of the Eastern Ice Yachting Association. (This race is a contest between the winning boats from each of six sail area classes, ranging from the 75-square feet “Skeeters” up to the 350-square feet Class A boats.) It started in a medium light breeze, which turned out to be only a temporary lull in a howling northwester. The big boat skippers started off in fine style, the three largest boats immediately walking away from the little fellows. And then the gale came back! All the boats started to go faster but the big ones were immediately in trouble; too much canvas. The only recourse was to luff, which they did, with a will, and managed to stay right side up. But what of the “BE” boat? No luffing there! She started out after the leaders like a shot out of a gun. She caught and passed all but one — and the skipper of that one can speak with feeling when he says that it was a steadily losing fight. And so we come to the end of this first powwow on ice boats, with a picture of the ice boat of the future gradually forming in our minds: Rig: Cat (until someone works out a narrow, rigid jib that can be controlled by a mechanical device like a greenhouse window rig). Type: Bow-steering (until the built-in contradictory forces of the stern-steerer can be eliminated by improved design or until the four-runner boat comes into her own). Backbone: Long and relatively heavy. Size: As small as possible, for strong winds — probably not over 175 square feet (Class C) in any case. Shape of sail: Tall, narrow (2 to 1), and as smooth of surface texture as can possibly be obtained. Also, rigidly and stiffly arched into the proper airfoil curvature, either by full length battens in cloth sails, or by properties of the sail itself if we can get to metal or plywood sails. (To Be Continued) Ray Ruge If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
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An Up-To-Date Ice Yacht Using A Sail Boat Rig by Raymond A. Ruge Yachting magazine December 193612/1/2023 Editor's Note: This article by Raymond A. Ruge is reproduced from the December 1936 issue of Yachting magazine. The language, spelling and grammar of the article reflects the time period when it was written. For information about current ice boating on the Hudson River go to White Wings and Black Ice here.
In spite of all the progress toward efficiency and speed made in sailing yachts, the ice boat, the fastest non-motorized vehicle known to man, has remained until very recently the slave of convention and tradition. Improvements in materials, sails, runners, rigging and construction details followed one another in steady progression, but in her fundamental design, the ice boat of 1930 was the ice boat of 1870 — and she still retained the devilish habit of spinning. There was no escaping the tendency to depress the bow and lift the stern whenever a hard puff struck the sails. This inevitable result of the action of the forces driving her is familiar to all small boat sailors. In a sail boat, with her rudder buried deep in the water, it is not particularly annoying. But let an ice boat's rudder be lifted the slightest fraction of an inch and it loses its already precarious grip on the glassy surface, and away she goes, in a cloud of ice slivers and a roar of grinding runners, around and around in a double or even triple spin, completely out of control. At a speed of sixty to seventy miles an hour, which is common enough, and with a competitor driving hard only a few feet astern, the possibility of a nasty crack-up is not hard to imagine.
Once the simplicity of this, and the beautiful self-compensating relation of wind pressure to rudder-on-ice pressure, dawns on you, it seems too good to be true. While it is difficult to assign the exact credit for this brilliant solution of the ice boat's one great fault, it is safe to attribute the development and perfection of the bow-steerer to the famous Meyer Brothers, of Wisconsin. They built and raced the renowned Paula series of ice yachts, all champions but all experimental, each one eliminating certain faults found in her predecessor. Editor’s Note: This article is found in "Time" magazine, Monday, Feb. 08, 1937 As a result, the bow-steerer is now as safe as she is fast, and ice yachting is coming into its own all over the northern part of the country. For the bow-steerer won't spin. Her pilot need not ease her through the puffs — he can hold his sheets and let her go — and the fact that bow-steerers everywhere are consistently defeating older boats of far greater sail area is sufficient proof that she can go. Convinced by the logic of this analysis of spinning, and of the bow-steerer as the solution, during the fall of 1925 I constructed Icicle. She carried the rig of my 18-foot one-design sail boat - about 190 square feet, in a conventional jib and mainsail. A club was added to the foot of the jib, both to keep it flat and to simplify the jib sheet. By using a club, a single sheet working on a traveler makes the jib practically self-tending, a necessary feature where the main sheet and steering wheel require constant attention. The rig of almost any small sloop can be used on an ice boat if provision is made for the heavier wind stresses involved. Wintry blasts are heavier, faster and harder-hitting than summer breezes. Sails which have been discarded because they have stretched and lost their precious draft are just the ones to use on your ice boat for, contrary to sail boat practice, the rule here is ”the flatter, the faster.” Icicle has a fuselage, or body, made of light frames and ribs, covered with unbleached muslin to which was applied airplane "dope™ and aluminum paint. This superstructure serves merely as a shield from the biting wind and is built around the traditional central backbone timber, made of an 18-foot 4" x 6" to which was bolted a 16-foot 4" × 4", over- hanging 6 feet aft. This composite timber rides on edge, with the 4" x6" below and toward the bow. The runner plank crosses under the extreme after end of the 18-foot lower member. The mast is stepped directly on the backbone, passing through a hole in the cloth deck which also admits the main and jib sheets to the cockpit, where they are controlled by jam cleats. The backbone also carries the steering gear and all fastenings for frame guys, so that the cloth super-structure is subjected to no stresses except those caused by wind pressure. This permits a comfortable, protected riding position, automobile steering, and a side-by-side arrangement of the two seats, all of which tend to increase the pleasure and reduce the discomfort of a day's fast sailing.
The runner plank shown embodies the latest improvements in design. First of all, those familiar with past practice will note the unusual length of the plank for the sail area carried. This serves two purposes; it prevents excessive hiking and makes for easy riding, both of which are aids to speed. By using waterproof casein glue, a laminated arched plank, light in weight and springy in action, is easy to make. The second departure from older practice lies in the extra foot of plank projecting beyond the runners. This carries on its underside a smooth, rounded oak sliding block which comes in contact with the ice when the boat hikes very high and allows her to slip sideways and come down right side up rather than capsize. A good runner plank is essentially a broad, flat wooden spring. A stiff plank means a slower boat. The runner plank is fastened to the backbone by two pieces of 2-1/2" x 2-1/2" angle iron, drilled for bolts through the side rails and plank. A block of rubber under the bearing surfaces will absorb some of the shock when passing over rough ice. The most vital parts of any ice boat, where the right thing is the only thing, are the runners. There are many types of runners in use, but the oldest is still one of the most satisfactory and may be sometimes acquired in good condition second, third, and even fourth-hand. This type of runner consists of an oak top piece to which is bolted a cast iron or steel shoe, sharpened to a "V" edge. It is in the subtle but all important rocker of the shoe and the correct angle of the ice faces, or the two sides of the "V," that the fast runner differs from the slow one. For an all-purpose runner, which will carry the boat through soft ice and slush as well as over hard, black ice, the faces of the shoe, called "ice faces." should meet at about 90° and be from ½" to ¾" wide. The rudder is a shorter edition of the main runners but has little rocker. The rudder must be kept sharp for, if it skids, control of the fast-moving craft is, at best, sketchy. After the runners are mounted, oil the inside faces of the chocks, next to the runners. This is one spot that must not be varnished or painted. Graphite is often smeared over these faces to help the runner rock freely. Keep the runner shoes greased to prevent rusting; when leaving the boat for a protracted interval, it is well to remove the runners entirely and keep them at home, along with the sails, where they will be dry and safe from inquisitive skaters. Allowing $40.00 for new runners, and the same amount for a fair suit of sails, the materials for this boat should total about $120. The yachtsman who has a sail boat with a suitable rig and the usual assortment of odd rigging, turnbuckles, blocks, etc., can cut the necessary outlay down to $75. Clear spruce is the lightest and best material for the spars, runner plank and back-bone; fir is second choice. Fir is easier to get and is cheaper but is apt to be heavy. Runner tops, chocks and knees are of quartered white oak. Plywood 3/8" thick is ideal for deck and bottom of back-bone. A few oak slats passing under the plywood floor from rail to rail will stiffen it sufficiently under the cockpit. A boat of this type can be transported easily by trailer, and two men can set her up in an hour, provided that this has been already completely done at home before taking the boat to the ice. It is hoped that the success of the adapted sail boat rig may encourage other yachtsmen to build ice boats to carry the rigs of their sail boats. The most active ice boating centers in the East are all within fifty miles of New York and can be reached by car in a couple of hours. I know I can speak for the ice boating fraternity in assuring all of you a most cordial welcome to this king of winter sports. Editor’s Note: During the fall of 1925, Ray Ruge, at age 17, constructed the Icicle. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
It is a quiet, cold evening in December 1918. Spread-eagled on the extreme end of our dock, I am fascinated by watching the lake start to freeze. First the surface stops moving, becomes smooth and still - then, suddenly, it wrinkles up into sheets of frozen surface-film, with long crystals spreading out all over. In a few minutes, the frozen film is actually thick enough to lift - very carefully - but of course it is delicate and fragile. Suddenly my mother's voice calls down from the house, and I have to abandon my scientific research into how ice really forms - but I had seen enough so I have never forgotten it. The entire experience of growing up by the side of a beautiful lake which provided swimming, fishing, sailing, skating and eventually iceboating colored my life from then on - I was eight when we moved there, and twenty-seven when we were forced to abandon the place by the implacable march of the Great Depression. Of all the activities that Lake Mahopac offered, those I loved the most were those of Winter. Both my parents were excellent skaters - I recall at the age of five I was equipped with a proper pair of single-runner skates firmly attached to shoes, taken to a rink in New York, given a little push and told to "Skate!" Of course it took a few minutes to get the hang of it - but by mid-afternoon I was waddling around the rink on my own - no holding of parental hands. The folks knew, of course, that double-runner skates are an abomination, and that holding someone's hand is really no help either until after one reaches puberty! Then the motivation is quite another story. So here is a ten-year-old, excited about winter and all it has I to offer up there in the country, and also an avid reader. I found a book by Ralph Henry Barbour entitled Iceboat Number One in the school library. Clearly this was my undoing - or doing, which ever way you look at it. The story was a typical boy's book - the hero built his own boat, and finally beat the rich boy who had a fancy professionally-built boat, but didn't know how to sail it very well. It didn't take me long to identify with the local hero - but how to begin? Right here is where my father's support became what made it all happen. First he bought us a litte book - as it turned out, one of the best books on the subject that existed at that time - about 1920. The title was simply “Ice Boating”, but the contents included articles by most of the leading sportsmen of the time, including the famous Archibald Rogers, owner of “Jack Frost”, last winner of the Ice Yacht Challenge Pennant of America. Mr. Rogers' reminiscences of sailing and racing on the Hudson opened our eyes to a really terrific sport - plagued by the vagaries of weather, as always, but truly terrific when it could be done. Our immediate problem, now that our appetite was whetted, was what sort of boat could we build, with our limited resources and complete lack of facilities to enable us to even dream of a craft like “Jack Frost”, or even a miniature of her. We did have the rig of my father's sailing canoe - strictly Old Town, vintage 1913. We decided to put together something to carry that rig, and see what we could do. This had to be built of material at hand - planks, framing lumber remaining from the building of our house a year or two earlier. What emerged was a triangular platform with 2x8 planks on edge surrounding it - to keep us from falling out The mast was stepped in a wooden block, and stayed with odd pieces of wire - probably wire clothes line. Three little turnbuckles served to keep this in some sort of order, and the sail hung well enough exactly as it had on the canoe. Of course, here we were ready to set forth, but on what? What do we do for runners? We had learned enough from our little book to understand that runners had to be sharpened to a V-edge, must have some slight rocker rather than be dead straight on the bottom, and so forth. It was clearly time for Dad to step in again. After all, he was an engineer, he understood the problem, and as it turned out, he knew where to go for help - Naylor's Foundry, in Peekskill. He made some sketches and after a few days, the word came that our runners were ready. They were cut from 313" steel plate, sharpened to a V on the bottom, and hung between pairs of angle irons on a single bolt, so they could rock. The rudder-post and tiller were a little more complex, but they worked OK, which was the main purpose. It was easy enough to mount these steel parts on our little platform - we were ready to launch! Imagine the excitement by all hands - Mother included (after all, she had learned to skate on the Hudson River and had often hooked a ride behind the local iceboats). To our delight, the little rig sailed fine. As it turned out, the real beneficiaries of this craft were my folks, who sailed it by daylight and by moonlight, while I was away at school playing hockey and getting myself ready for college. During my college years - 1925-1931 - a fellow-sailor from the Lake who had some remains of a big Hudson River iceboat that had been allowed to lie outdoors in the summer time (the "kiss of death" for any wooden boat not properly covered) - decided to use the rig of his one-design sailboat and build a simple 24-foot boat to carry it. He was lucky to have those fine Hudson River runners - with the good spars and sails he also had, from the summer-sailing class on the Lake, the rest was easy enough. His boat sailed very well - so well that I resolved to go and do likewise - since I too had a sailing rig from the summer boat. The obvious gap in my equipment was runners, rudder-post and tiller. I resolved to go to New Jersey - Red Bank and Long Branch - where there were lots of iceboats. I finally salvaged a set of runners from a marsh where they had been thrown when the shed where the boat was stored had burned down. This meant the owner no longer had a boat, and had about given up on iceboating. He sold me the lot for a ten-dollar bill. I had my work cut out for me - the shoes were terribly rusty and pitted, and even the oak tops had started to rot. But persistence and plenty of sweat resulted in a fine set of runners, when they were finally finished. The iron was excellent, which I surely did not realize when I found them. Admittedly, I was lucky (and persistent). This boat sailed very well - in fact, with her good runners and sails, she had a head start on most of the others that were around at that time. By now, I was an avid iceboater, and the Depression provided me with opportunities for working on boats and sailing them which would never have existed in more prosperous times. At that time (1935-6-7) I was running a small resort hotel, and in the winter, there wasn't much going on during the week. So I tinkered with boats and sailed them whenever possible. In the January 1935 issue of “The Sportsman” magazine, there appeared an article about the great mid-western breakthrough in iceboat design - the advent of the front-steering boat, in Wisconsin. These first bow-steerers were large, like their stern-steering predecessors in the more successful racing classes. But a series of very serious capsizes nearly caused the whole idea of bow-steering to be abandoned while yet really untried. The problem was not with bow-steering per se, but with lack of understanding of the proper size, weight and design of a successful boat that steered from the bow. The way to go turned out to be small, rather than large. A man named Walter Beauvais built what he called the “Beau-Skeeter”, only about twelve feet long with an eight-foot cross-plank. Because it was small and light, it could be sailed on the ragged edge of a capsize without fear or danger - if it went over, the pilot fell only a few feet, and by "starting" the sheet, he often kept it right-side-up anyway. The fact that the driver always went up when a bow-steerer "hiked", carried with it the message of possible trouble, and resulted in many improvements in the “Beau-Skeeter” design. The Palmer Boat Company of Fontana, Wisconsin on Lake Geneva, brought out some very fast single-and-two-seater skeeters that opened my eyes rudely the first time I encountered them on Greenwood Lake. I had won a race the day before with the boat that carried my Lake Mahopac one-design sloop rig, and I thought she was at the least, a pretty good iceboat for the time. We set up a little scrub race between my boat and two of these Palmer skeeters, and they sailed three laps to my two. That was convincing enough -clearly the bow-steerer was the faster type, regardless of size or sail area. This had continued to be true - the only interest that today exists among the older stern-steerers is confined to racing within their own classes in the Eastern Ice Yachting Association, and competing for certain trophies that are restricted to the classic type. They are entirely different in action and in speed, but they require enough skill to present a challenge -as long as you don't have to be the fastest boat out there. In the meantime, over the past half-century, the so-called “Skeeter”, which started at 12 ft. long x 8 ft wide, has grown to 24 to 26 ft long and 16 to 18 ft wide, still carrying (theoretically) the original 75 square feet of sail. By taking full advantage of a loophole in the sail-area rule which permits a 12-inch "roach" or projection outside of the straight chord of the sail's leech, with 24 to 26-foot masts, giving a long leech, the actual sail area now being carried is closer to 90 sq. ft. Speeds have jumped into the unbelievable regions - there is even a story from Wisconsin (the hotbed of the big Skeeters) of a boat reputed to have been "clocked" by a State Policeman's radar at over 150 miles per hour. There are many reasons why this is possible - suffice it to say here that the big, long, "lean and mean" skeeter is the fastest thing on the ice today. Back in the 1936-1937 days, I got involved in building the very best boat I could, following the overall setup of the big Palmer boat that looked to be unreachable. Surely as to finish and fittings she was far out of my reach - but it turned out some of the basic design decisions I had made were correct, and I beat her on every occasion we raced. That is another story - suffice it to say that my 1937 boat, named “Charette II” reposes today in the New York State Museum in Albany, contemplating her medals and past trophies. It has been a nice wind-up to a lengthy career. Ray Ruge. AuthorThis article was written by Ray Ruge and originally published in the 1984 Winter Update issue of Hudson River Maritime Museum's publication Focs'le News. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!
Last week we saw footage of the beautiful stern-steerer Vixen. This week we travel not to the Hudson River, but to Michigan for this fascinating footage of a 1930s Chevrolet racing one of those rocket-style iceboats than began replacing the wooden old stern-steerers.
Ice boats were at one time the fastest vehicles on earth - able to race trains and win. Automobiles were just starting to push the limits of speed, and this film was part of an advertising campaign by Chevrolet to illustrate just how fast their new vehicles were.
Front-steering iceboats like this one were popular in the Hudson Valley in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s as well. Streamlined and looking more like rocketships than boats, they pushed the limits of speed on ice.
​Ray Ruge, who in 1964 helped revive the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club to save the old-style wooden stern-steerers, was in the 1940s and '50s racing more modern ice boats. In 1940 he won the Championship Race of the Eastern Ice Boat Pennant of America, held at Orange Lake, NY.
Although not as popular as the old wooden stern-steerers, you still see wooden or, more commonly, fiberglass "rocket" iceboats on the Hudson River.
If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!​
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