Skate Sailing on Lake Champlain

By Daan Zwick

 As a fourteen-year-old Burlington boy in 1936 I was greatly attracted in the winter by the huge expanse of ice that was Lake Champlain.  By the middle of January the ice was usually solid all the way across to New York State, and a village of hundreds of fishing shanties, each set on top of a hole that had been chopped through the ice to receive fishing lines, had arisen in Burlington Bay a few hundred yards from shore. 

 Lake Champlain off Burlington

Farther out, ice boats would be skimming swiftly about, their large sails rising from low wooden platforms set on two long widely-set runners.

I have never had such a sensation of speed as I experienced while lying on such a platform about six inches from the ice, skimming along at forty miles per hour.

   Right near shore, north and south of Burlington, there would be areas marked out as hockey rinks with crude goals at the ends.  Later in the season, farther from shore, there would be large rectangles bounded at the corners by old Christmas trees, marking areas from which blocks of ice had been cut for commercial purposes, indicating those dangerous areas of thin ice or open water.

 The lake would freeze in huge sheets, smooth and even for hundreds of yards, separated by cracks caused by the expansion of the freezing water.  Those cracks were not very large, and the water in them froze also, leaving just a rough place for skaters to jump over and ice boaters to rumble across.  Only occasionally would there be a layer of snow on the ice that would prevent easy skating - strong winds usually blew the cold dry snow off the smooth surfaces.

I found in my Boy Scout handbook a reference to a pamphlet that showed how to construct a sail for skating.  I sent my twenty cents to buy that - one of my best investments ever.  The major ingredients I had to buy were two hickory poles, one 8-feet-long for a mast and the other7 feet long for the boom, and a thinner nine-foot ash pole.  I had to steam this pole to make it curved for the top of the sail frame.  The boom was lashed at its center by a leather thong to the mast about five feet from one end.  The long curved ash pole was centered on the mast and bent to meet the ends of the boom to forge the top of the kite shape    I laid this frames on a big sheet of unbleached muslin, as a pattern for a kite-shaped sail that I cut out and attached to the ends of the mast and boom, using a cord around its perimeter. 

 A modern edition of Daan's skate sail on Canyon Ferry MT, Photo by Viki Gluek

To sail, I pulled the kite up vertically with the boom across my shoulder on the windward side, and leaned against the wind, turning my body in the direction I wanted to go.  To stop I just lifted the sail over my head and held it horizontally.  Then I could come about by dropping the sail on my other side, and leaning that shoulder against the wind.  I found that I had to buy a pair of 18-inch racing skates – regular hockey skates did not have enough bite on the ice to allow me to sail into the wind.

 The pamphlet also described making and using a handy safety device.  I purchased two short hand-held ice picks or augers, screwed a hook-eye into the end of each handle, and connected them by a five-foot cord.  I carried one in each jacket pocket.  The purpose was that if I fell through the ice, the picks would be readily available to grab, one in each hand, to enable me to stab them into the ice, to climb back up onto the surface of the ice.  I always carried them, but I never had to use them.

 The sail made skating on the lake easy and exhilarating.  Instead of fighting the wind, I was using it, so I could go farther and faster than mere skating would allow.  However, the lake was always bigger and stronger than I was.  I never went as far as I had hoped to.

 Daan Zwick  6/20/11

Note: See the previous blog entry for a little background on Daan