Hard-water Sailing

Spectators gather at the foot of Toronto’s Bay St. to view a variety of iceboats in 1907.

“There were the iceboats, which were a very great delight to us. They were made triangular with one piece of iron at the point and two others on the other points. It was built like a platform and had a sail on. The motion was quite delicious–you went so very fast and smoothly. There were very few iceboats on the river when we were there.”

The above quote comes from My Girlhood In Canada Many Years Ago, a book by Frances Hale Orlebar. Written in the 1920s, Orlebar was describing her favourite childhood pastime while growing up on Prince Edward Island in the 1840s.

Not all iceboat journeys of that era were quite so pleasant. The Wentworth Historical Society has recorded an 1836 iceboat trip taken by three Upper Canadian businessmen. William Johnston, Angus McGee and William Rayne built a “clumsy triangular structure made of scantling, shod with skate runners and an old quilt as a sail” to sail the Hamilton harbour at the west end of Lake Ontario. “A brisk southwest breeze carried them along at a merry speed” until they attempted to land their vessel. Their inexpert sailing caused them to hit the bank at full speed which sent all three passengers flying “like peas from a plate.” Johnston, McGee and Rayne suffered numerous non-fatal injuries to their bodies, clothes and egos. As for the iceboat, only the quilt survived.

The Dutch are credited with inventing the iceboat in 1650. And that comes as no surprise when you consider the number of inland waterways that crisscross the Netherlands and become frozen flat surfaces in winter. It was an enterprising Dutch sailor who attached iron blades to his icebound boat–a boat he depended on to earn a living in the inland shipping business. With the blades on his boat, he could operate year-round.

By 1790, iceboats began appearing on the Hudson River in New York State, built by settlers of Dutch descent. Like their European counterparts, these early boats were crude affairs–slow and hard to steer because they used four skates arranged in a square just like a four-wheeled carriage.

This arrangement was fine for hauling cargo or people at low speed but if the crew was not vigilant, they sometimes found their clumsy boats had a curious tendency to rear up and try to take off like a thoroughbred racehorse hitched to a hay wagon. Which brings up the essential quality of the iceboat–speed.

In the 1700s, with a moderate wind, even the clumsiest four-blade cargo boat could easily outrun a galloping horse. This is because properly trimmed sails create “apparent wind”, a force that can accelerate a craft up to six times the speed of the real wind. Water and waves cause too much drag to allow traditional sailing craft to take advantage of this phenomenon, but mirror-smooth ice provides a near friction-free surface–ideal for high-speed travel. European iceboaters were also hampered by the fact that they were sailing on waterways already crowded with other traffic, including skaters, horse sleighs and ice fishermen. In North America, iceboat captains enjoyed wide-open spaces.

North American iceboat designs began changing from the 19th century onwards. The boxy hulls and quadruple runners gave way to a lean triangular design created for speed, not comfort. The main body of the craft became little more than a long beam with a rudder at the stern. Crew and passengers perched on a shallow platform just forward of the rudder. Near the front of the boat was a crossbeam supported by an iron (and later steel) skate at each end. A sturdy mast of oak or sometimes even iron was erected at this point.

As iceboat designs and crew skills improved, speeds increased dramatically. By the middle of the 19th century, boats were regularly reaching speeds of 96 kilometres per hour while the fastest steam trains were achieving far less than that. A seasoned crew could “hike” one runner off the ice for long runs and thereby reduce drag even more.

Clearly, iceboat travel was not for the faint of spirit. The craft lacked seatbelts because the crew often had to go forward and ease themselves out on the runners to counterbalance the boat as it hiked. Occasionally, an unexpected bump might eject the pilot. If this happened, the crew would often be left clinging to the rigging while the boat went scudding out of control across the ice. Iceboats were also not equipped with brakes. To stop, someone had to lower the sail which was not always easy when travelling at high speed and at a 45-degree angle.

Ice conditions also varied from day to day. Mirror smooth ice conditions were extremely rare–most pilots had to contend with slush patches, snowdrifts, and bumps and cracks in the ice caused by changing temperatures and water currents. In the worst case scenarios, open water would swallow a craft and its crew whole. Yet, these challenges did not hamper the iceboat’s popularity in Canada and elsewhere.

Nineteenth century iceboats ranged in size from a few metres long to a 20-metre monster yacht named the Icicle. It was commissioned in 1869 by John Roosevelt, a wealthy New Englander. The vessel was rigged like a schooner, hoisted 96.3 square metres of sail and carried six crewmen plus passengers, including occasionally J.R.’s nephew–the future president of the United States–Theodore Roosevelt. The Icicle was a familiar sight on the Hudson River, regularly humiliating the Chicago Express and other “high speed” trains that ran on the tracks parallel to the river.

Iceboats likely came to Canada with the Loyalists after the American Revolution, 1775­83. One of the earliest Canadian references to their existence was an 1824 newspaper advertisement by Isaac Columbus, a British veteran of the War of 1812. According to the ad, he ran a blacksmith shop in downtown York–as Toronto was known then–and announced he could make and repair “the irons” of an iceboat.

A few years later, artist John Howard painted a typical Canadian winter holiday on an icebound Toronto Bay, circa 1835. In the painting, people can be seen skating, sledding and horse-sleigh riding. But in the background is the unmistakable silhouette of an iceboat. Photo archives, meanwhile, contain pictures of an iceboat owned by the Toronto harbour authority and used by police to patrol the Toronto waterfront.

The Musée du Québec has a more detailed painting of an early Canadian iceboat, painted by Dutch-born Canadian painter Cornelius Krieghoff around 1860. Krieghoff shows three British army officers enjoying an iceboat cruise near Quebec City. The boat is one of the old style–a four-skate, boxy passenger vehicle being leisurely steered by a pipe-smoking Habitant. Judging by the relaxed body postures of the passengers, their ride appears to be as smooth as Frances Orlebar’s. However, as speeds picked up, iceboat rides became less serene.

Edwin J. Schoettle, a sailing expert, had this to say about his “hard-water” sailing experience: “The sensation at first is one of gliding through space, and for that reason the feeling is almost that of flying. Rough places in the ice that are impossible to avoid oftentimes make the gliding sensation rather bumpy, because it is to be remembered that ice yachts are not fitted with ‘elliptic’ or ‘semi-elliptic’ springs so often installed in automobiles. The hard steel runners fastened to the solid oak planks of yachts coming in contact with hard rough ice create a jarring sensation that would ‘shiver the timbers’ of any well-tarred salt and make him wish for the calm and peace of a 40-mile gale at sea.”

Iceboat races quickly became popular. Local champions from Kingston, Ont., nearby Belleville and Toronto would regularly challenge each other. A typical racing course was triangular in shape, approximately 16 kilometres in length, with the turning points marked by old Christmas trees planted in the ice. Because of the peculiar physics of “apparent wind”, iceboats ran fastest heading into the wind.

Besides intercity rivalry, there was always a fierce competition between American and Canadian iceboat clubs around the Great Lakes. The Kingston Ice Yacht Club was formed in 1896 with the principal aim of humbling the American boats that darted defiantly along the icebound Canadian/American border between Ontario and New York State. Internationally recognized racing classes developed based on sail size. To encourage their countrymen, Hiram Walker & Sons, Ltd., a distiller in Walkerville, Ont., created the Walker International Challenge Cup to promote Canadian ice racing. Fortunately, Canadian iceboaters did not really need much encouragement.

Until World War I, iceboat racing was big news in Canada. Local newspapers would follow the antics of their home racers faithfully because high-speed craft and iron-nerved crews were natural newsmakers. What a typical race looked like can be seen in these extracts from a Toronto Daily Star article about a best-two-out-of-three contest held Feb. 19, 1907 in the Toronto Harbour. The name of one of the iceboats, by the way, was IT (Rolling Out The Russell, January/February).

“That several people were not killed or maimed in yesterday’s iceboat race…is a mystery to those who were in or saw the race. Of seven boats which started, only three were able to finish the course…. (The iceboat) King Edward, while going out to the first buoy at a speed of over a mile a minute, broke her leeward skate off the runner plank and went careening down to leeward, tearing and leaping to and fro like a locoed (sic) bronco. Temeraire, gybing over at the Mugg’s Landing buoy, when she was in the grip of a fierce squall, turned a flip and sent her crew of eight flying in all directions. Just imagine a boat going at 65 miles an hour turning over and stop to figure out how far the men who were clinging to her are going to go before they land. Temeraire went over and scattered her crew over an acre of solid ice, yet every man jack of them was able to scramble to his feet.

“First Attempt…was giving Marinion and IT a run for their money when her steering apparatus gave out. She yawed crazily about and, after making a merry-go-round of herself, consented to stand still and let the other racers go by.”

For the second race, the wind picked up considerably.

“It blew so hard that every boat in the fleet reefed down except Phalen’s IT and William Fisher’s Temeraire. Phalen wouldn’t reef if it blew a cyclone and Fisher couldn’t because his sail has no reef points. Better judgment told Fisher to remain a spectator, but someone taunted him with yellowness, and he promptly brought his boat to the mark just to show his detractor that there wasn’t a jaundiced spot on his whole epidermis. ‘We’ll sail the course or come back in matchwood,’ said Fisher.

“IT went away with a jump that boded ill for her rivals. A fierce puff caught her from out of John Street, and she reared up on two skates. There were two men out on the blade, but they could not begin to hold her down. Up she went, and up some more until the skate was 10 feet off the ice. Her sheet was hastily slackened but she hovered up on two blades until it seemed that nothing would save her. It was not until a couple more men pulled their weight out to weather on her, and her sail was flapping, that she came back to the ice. She landed with a bump, picked up her speed and set sail after the flying Temeraire.”

The newspaper story went on to describe how two of the boats malfunctioned and couldn’t finish the race. It concluded with the words: “Strenuous sport, this iceboating.”

Iceboats were also a common sight in Canada’s west. On Beaverhill Lake near Tofield, Alta., the participants could possibly lay claim to the invention of the sport of hang gliding: “In 1914-15 there was no snow on the lake the latter part of February and since its surface was smoothly frozen, three iceboats were constructed by local residents. Harry Rogers and Dawson Manners owned one of them. When the lake froze in the winter, a crack would form running parallel to the shoreline. Sometimes the ice would pile up in an inverted V shape and at other times one sheet of ice would slide over the others.

“One particular Sunday afternoon, aided by a strong northwest wind, the trio of iceboats sailed east…and came back along the north side. When they began to look for a spot to cross the crack, it was not easily found. They spied a spot where the north sheet of ice slid over the south sheet. It looked like a fairly level crossing so they taxied around, and came at this gentler slope at about 95 kilometres per hour. After briefly “sailing through the air with the greatest of ease,” they landed–luckily–right side up. Stopping to observe what had launched their spectacular takeoff, they found they had climbed a two-metre ridge and sailed through the air for 23 metres before they made their next contact with the ice.

Dawson Manners’ reaction to this experience was that, while he would not take a thousand dollars for the experience, he would not take $10,000 for a repetition of it.

Iceboat popularity peaked at the turn of the 20th century, but by the 1920s the public’s interest began to wane as motor power vehicles began setting new speed records on land, sea and air. Barely anyone noticed when, in 1938, John Buckstaff pushed an iceboat to over 230 kilometres per hour on Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin–a record that still stands to this day. After WW II, the explosive growth of industry and population throughout North America seriously reduced the iceboat’s habitat. Warm sewage and industrial discharge prevented ice formation near most cities and large towns and iceboat enthusiasts were driven to remote waterways to enjoy their sport.

This virtually removed the sport from the public eye. Iceboats also became smaller to make them easier to transport. Today, the world’s most popular iceboat is the DN, a one-man craft designed during the Great Depression for a contest sponsored by the Detroit News daily paper.

In the past two decades, iceboats have enjoyed a renaissance. A modern race not only draws competitors from across Canada and the U.S., but also from Scandinavia and many former Warsaw pact countries. The reigning DN champion lives in Poland.

But the old stern steerers might not disappear completely. Jon Soyka, a filmmaker from Hamilton, has spent the last 10 years putting together a video record of Canada’s iceboat heritage. “I’ve got all the official photos. Now I’m asking people to ransack their attics for old films of their iceboats. When I finish, these boats will be with us forever.”

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