This weekend me and my mate Archie (he's the grinning idiot on the right) popped over to Sweden to try our hand at ice sailing.
Unfortunately, when it got exciting we were too busy having fun (and
scaring ourselves silly) to stop and take photos, so here are the
precious few that I did manage to snap. Some fairly crappy video here.
15 comments:
this is great, it really looks like fun
Q: if you meet a hole in the ice are you floating? hoovering in the icey wind? or sunk like a dead cat left out in the rain?
looks to me like the hulls would float. That's ok then.
I'll bet you can really get some speed going. That looks fun.
Debs, they tend not to float. If a boat goes through the ice (which happens only very occasionally) then you get out quick, and let other people worry about retrieving your boat, because in those conditions you don't want to stay in wet clothes very long! Generally, the water's shallow enough that you can stand on the bottom no problem and the boat can be retrieved easily. If not, then you'd better hope it turns up somewhere downstream!
Well we weren't exactly expert, but we got a top speed of 41 miles an hour from a wind of about 23mph.
Top speed for that type of boat is about 80 knots, or 92 mph. Forty was plenty quick enough though!
Oh yeah, I pop over to Sweden and go ice sailing all the time. (/jealous sarcasm) Looks amazing.
To be honest, it all seems like a bit of a dream now I'm back. One slightly surreal weekend.
That's pretty damn nifty! I've wanted to do this ever since reading a Moorcock book that featured an ice schooner.
I'm thinking a video might be the best way to show this, rather than photos, anyway, as you hurtle across the ice.
It seems not. They occaisionally disappear through the ice. A
Good photos. Top weekend. A
That's my boat. F. Gump
Definitely! We had all sorts of plans for making a helmet-cam using duct tape and a mobile phone, but in the event we never quite got round to it. The only bit of video I got is just a little white blob moving across the ice - doesn't really convey the excitement. Shame.
Yeah, all right, don't rub it in. You had the pretty boat.
(all the photos are of Archie's boat, because mine was a black-and-fluorescent-green fashion disaster)
*sigh* You really are trying to make us all jealous! Was it fun?
[edit: Of course it was fun. Sorry, jealousy makes me dense]
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