The Rose Valley Lake ice-boating season is now officially over for Greg Kohlers troop of hearty sailors. Yesterdays epic wind and cold gave four friends a fantastic finish to the hard water sailing season. We for sure clocked another top speed around 60 mph and covered a 100 miles of more on each boat. It was bumpy full power, high speed sailing all day long on the solid frozen slab of late season snow/ice. The ice I checked wed. morn had been top-half slush, with just 4 hard intact ice remaining below the rotten stuff. Then it recieved another 24 hrs of 50F and an inch or more of rain. So I was preparing to lament the lack of strong enough ice for Thursdays awesome 25 mph arctic vortex winds. But luckily, overnight the arctic freeze came in with 26 mph winds and re-froze all the slush and rain, strengthening the slab back up to a safe sturdy 8 (as long as it remained cold), but it didnt do much towards smoothing out the rough slushed fishermans boot tracks. So we bounced and bumped around on it. The other really cool gift of the day was the 5000 or so Canadian geese that occupied the north half of the lake, emitting a hilarious raucous honking goose woodstock all day long, that could only barely be matched by our scraping scrawling of skidding iceboat blades and thunderous flapping of sails. They left us a lone and we left them alone, with plenty of sailing room at our favorite end of the lake. But occasionally something on the north shore would startle them all into a huge roaring flight that darkened the sky with the biggest swarming aerodynamic display ever! Anyway todays warm sun and tomorrows 50F will further rot the ice to the point of no longer being safe enough for fun.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:17:03 +0000
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