iceboating, a winter sport of sailing and racing on ice in modified boats. An iceboat is basically a sailboat that travels on thin blades, or runners, on the surface of the ice. An iceboat consists first of a single fore-and-aft spar, called the backbone, which may be wide enough to have a cockpit in its hull to carry the crew. This spar, or hull, is securely mounted on a broad, flexible crosspiece, or runner plank, which is at a right angle to it and which has a steel runner at each of its two ends. A third runner, the steering runner, is mounted at either the fore or aft end of the hull and is controlled by the helmsman using a tiller. A vertical mast carries either one or two sails, usually a mainsail and a jib. Smaller iceboats dispense with a cockpit in the hull and instead have a shallow, elliptical tray mounted on the backbone and upon which the one- or two-man crew sits. The modern iceboat’s structural elements are made of high-strength steel.
Although there are hints of iceboating in the archaeological past as far back as 2000 bc in what is now the Scandinavian region, iceboating as a means of winter transport dates firmly only to the 17th and 18th centuries on the frozen Gulf of Riga and on the canals of the Netherlands. In 1790 the first iceboat appeared on the Hudson River in New York.
The sport began in the mid-19th century, the Poughkeepsie Ice Yacht Club being formed in 1865 and the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club in 1870. A Swedish club was founded in 1901, and in 1928 the European Ice Yachting Union was formed with Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, Austria, and Germany as members.
The wooden ice yachts of the 19th century were large and had six or seven crew members. The Icicle was 22.9 yards (21 m) long and had 1,070 square feet (99 square m) of sail. Ice yachting was a rich man’s sport. In 1900 the fleet of the Hudson River club numbered more than 50, including 6 of the first class with more than 600 square feet (54.75 square m) of sail. These large iceboats reached speeds which at that time were the fastest ever attained by any vehicle. The American iceboat Scud, for example, sailed at 107 miles per hour (172 km/h) in 1885.
In about 1931, Starke Meyer of Milwaukee, Wis., designed a hull with the steering runner at the bow and the runner plank at the stern, instead of the other way around, as in most previous designs. The downward and forward thrust of the mast, located between the two points of support, served to increase rudder traction and reduce the tendency of the craft to spin on the ice. Meyer’s bow-steering design defeated all competition, and smaller versions, called skeeters, with a sail of only about 75 square feet (7 square m), showed that they could sail safely and fast. By 1940 the design had crystallized, and the skeeter, or class E boat, as it is now designated, enjoyed a rapid growth. Skeeters were able to rival the larger iceboats in sailing speed, and they have dominated all open competitions over the past decades. The standard skeeter has a hull that is 22 feet (6.7 m) long. The DN-60, a boat with 60 square feet (5.6 square m) of sail, designed in the hobby shop of The Detroit News in 1937, suddenly caught on in the late 1950s and has been popular ever since. The standard DN is 12 feet (3.6 m) long with 60 to 80 square feet (5.6 to 7.4 square m) of sail.
The iceboat can reach at least four times the speed of the wind propelling it, and speeds of over 140 miles per hour (220 km/h) have been recorded. An iceboat that is sailing downwind can reach no greater a speed than that of the wind itself. But an iceboat can reach much faster speeds when it sails across the wind rather than being pushed along by it, since the boat creates a wind from the velocity of its own movement that greatly supplements the natural wind. These principles were only vaguely understood in the early days of iceboat racing, and the traditional rig with a stern-mounted rudder was the standard design despite the boat’s forward thrust sometimes lifting the stern rudder from the ice and sending the whole boat into a spin.
Iceboating became less popular in Europe after World War II but remained popular in the United States and Canada, mainly in the Northeast, where the ruling body is the Eastern Ice Yachting Association (founded 1937), and in the Midwest, where clubs from Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Ontario founded the Northwestern Ice Yachting Association in 1912. The regional associations have approximately six boat classes, ranging from 75 to 350 square feet (7 to 32 square m) of sail.
Association, national, and international races are held. Iceboat racing is generally like regular yachting in terms of right-of-way and overtaking. Races are typically run on a windward-leeward course such that the boats are usually sailing across the wind.