Hooked on the Wind by P.S. Wood

Editor's Note: This article was by P.S. Wood and originally published in the US AIR magazine January 1985. 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 these websites:
White Wings and Black Ice here.  
HRIYC here 
​Hudson River Ice Yacht Preservation Trust website here

Photograph by Eunice Harris US AIR magazine January 1985. Ray Ruge Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum

For thousands of enthusiasts, the high-speed excitement of iceboating is a habit that no one wants to break. Oh, you could always think of something - like running triathlons or climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. But of all the self-flagellating activities pursued in the name of sport, few can be more baffling to outsiders, and more compelling to those who are hooked—6,000 at latest count—than iceboating. Some miscreant once likened it to "driving a truck at 90 miles an hour in sub-zero weather down a steep, rutted hill without brakes and with bits of broken windshield flying in your face.”

​Get one alone, in a reflective moment, preferably in the fall when anticipation is high, and he may tell you what it's really like - or try to: The adrenaline is flowing and there is no cold; with the ice racing past you just inches away, the sense of speed is incredible; on smooth, black ice there is a silence given depth by the whoosh of the wind through the rigging and over the hull. So simple, so pure, so fast, one feels he must be approaching the outer edge, where the worldly crosses the boundary to the intergalactic. 

Ray Ruge Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum

What else could bring Charles Edward (Rock) Hildreth at the age of 48 to lay down his hammer and saw (he builds houses in the Hamptons, on eastern Long Island, where his family has lived for ten generations) a little early last Friday - or next Friday, or the Friday after - and hurry home to load up his 1977 Chevy station wagon? On a roof rack go the spars, planks, and hulls of two identical 12-foot DN iceboats. Sails, riggings, runners, sharpening equipment, other tools, and extra clothing are piled inside, until there is just room enough in the front seat for Hildreth and his similarly afflicted buddy, Tom Halsey. Halsey, like his brother John, whose whole family sails, is a potato farmer with 11 generations on the land. (Potato farmers with names like Hildreth, Halsey, and Topping still are well represented in the membership of the local Mecox Bay Ice Yacht Club, but besides the present Commodore, David Lee Brown, who is a sculptor, there are also painters, bank executives, test pilots, doctors, and writers. ABC anchorman Peter Jennings just bought a boat last year and joined the club.)

His car loaded, Hildreth then calls a special number and listens to a recording telling him where the action is that weekend—to wit: what lakes have ice and no snow (like as not somewhere deep in New Jersey). Then it's rising at 3:00 a.m., driving for five or six hours, unloading the station wagon, setting up their boats, racing all day, piling into a motel room somewhere for Saturday night, racing all day Sunday, and then driving home. And doing it, often, under arctic conditions that keep the saner segment of the population home by the fire. An affliction.
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In North America the true ice belt is no more than 150 miles wide. The sport has no true center. It hangs in a shallow arc from Cape Cod on the Eastern Seaboard out to the Great Lakes. On its way it passes through southern New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the major eastern areas. Midwesterners congregate on the wide-open lakes of Michigan and Wisconsin, where winds sweeping off the plains are relied upon as much as winter thaws to keep the ice open. Europe's ice belt begins in Sweden, and reaches through Germany, Poland, and into the USSR.  Four out of the past seven years, Poles and Latvians have won the World Championship - the Worlds, as they are known, sailed in alternate years in North America and Europe in the same DN design boat that Hildreth and Halsey race.

With iceboating, as with icebergs, there is a lot below the surface. A great deal, for instance, goes on in Hildreth's basement. It is almost axiomatic that an enthusiast like Hildreth built his own boat. And along about Christmastime it was in his cellar that he set it up for this season - sharpening and aligning the runners (to a tolerance of a few thousandths of an inch), checking all the fastenings, touching up the varnish. In fact, like most ardent iceboaters who have pursued the sport for a decade or more, Hildreth has built a series of boats (six DNs in his case, and he is already planning a seventh, because there's a slight weight refinement he would like to make). Although it is possible to buy a ready-made DN (cost with mast and sail runs about $2,500, but $1,000 should buy a serviceable second-hand boat), a large part of the challenge and pleasure of the sport is in the building, whether it be within the strict limits of the DN design (more on this later) or some imaginative aberration. Hildreth actually started when he was 12 - not just with the traditional bed sheet, broom handle, boards, and old ice skates, but with hand-me-down parts from his older brothers' and their friends' boats.

Today there are dirt bikes and snowmobiles and weekend trips to ski country to sate a young boy's appetite for thrills, but when Hildreth was starting out, just after World War II, there wasn't much a kid could do outdoors in winter on the flat eastern end of Long Island except take an iceboat out on Mecox Bay when it froze. The boats Hildreth and his confreres sailed then - they called them A boats - were larger than DNs. They were gaff-rigged, usually carried a couple of passengers, and by today's standards were clumsy. But when wind and ice were just right, they went like the blazes and produced enough excitement to hook a kid for life.

Photograph © The Bettman Archive. Ray Ruge Collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum

Editor’s Note: Wikipedia has an illustration of Gaff sail parts labeled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaff_rig

The A boats are pretty much gone now, relegated like horse-drawn carriages to the backs of barns. Their progeny have developed along two distinct lines, skeeters and DNs. Skeeters are to iceboating what formula one racing cars are to the automotive world. The sole design specification is sail area, 75 square feet. Beyond that they represent the cutting edge of iceboat development.  Anything goes, so that a skeeter regatta may produce an assemblage as varied and colorful as the Westminster Dog Show. And the boats really fly, reaching speeds of up to five times that of the wind, which translates to a top speed of 80 or 90 mph. The smaller DNs (62 square feet of sail), on the other hand, belong to a strictly regulated class. Weight, materials, and configuration are all specified to knife-edge limits. And still there is enough difference between boats to make the building and tuning of them as important as - or perhaps more important than - how well their skippers handle them out on the ice.

In hull streamlining, the tiniest bit helps. It is better to paint the name of the boat on the side rails than to mount two projecting mahogany name boards! It is just this sort of "ridiculous" extreme in streamlining which makes that unaccountable difference in speed, especially to windward.

Neil Leifer @ Time

The two classes of modern boats—DNs (right) and skeeters (above)--have the steering runner out front.
DNs are a strictly regulated class in terms of length, weight, materials, and sail size.
The only design specification for skeeters is sail area; beyond that, anything goes.

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Dan Hyde/Photo Researchers

Then, in 1933, a design breakthrough occurred as important to ice-boating as rocketry was to the aeronautical industry. Walter Beauvois from William Bay, Wisconsin, built what was, by the standards of the day, a mere toy. It had a 13-foot hull and a single, stiffly battened sail measuring 75 square feet. But the significant difference was that Beauvois sailed her backwards. That is, he turned the sail and runners 180 degrees so that now the steering runner was out front. The harder she was driven the more firmly her front runner held the ice. No flicker, though like any iceboat she still might hike a windward runner. And though far smaller than other iceboats of the day (and thus less expensive, more easily transported, and able to be sailed singlehandedly), Beau Skeeter, as he named his creation, outraced all comers. Here was a boat - the skeeter, as it would universally become known - that any man might aspire to own.
 
Four years later, at the height of the Depression, this democratization of a hitherto rich man's sport was completed with the appearance of the "DN." The letters stand for Detroit News, the newspaper that published the plans, following a contest for an easy-to-build, inexpensive iceboat of minimum size. The design - 12 feet long, 62 square feet of sail, single-handed - has become the world standard for racing.
 
The only significant inhibiting factor that keeps an iceboat from accelerating steadily until it reaches the speed of light and disappears into a time warp is what aeronautical engineers call drag. Drag builds with speed through a liquid or gaseous medium. It is the negative force that acts on the trailing edge of any surface, be it a car or a falling rock. Streamlining reduces drag. Even the most perfect airfoil, however, is subject to drag. When drag builds to the point that it equals the forward thrust, the iceboat has reached terminal velocity. It can't go any faster. What is intriguing to soft-water sailors is that on ice this natural speed limit is so much higher than in water. Even for a little DN, this may be as high as 80 or 90 mph, which, when one is skimming along on one's back only inches over the ice, gives an illusion of speed that transcends the supersonic, many times the six-mile distance. But the speed is real. Races, which begin with a running start, are three times up and down a mile-long course, set by a single leeward and windward mark. That is six miles by the tape, but a race may be over in minutes, even though the boats, dashing out on wide tacks, upwind and down, will cover many times the six-mile distance.

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