Cool photos: Campus bayshore hosts Super Bowl of ice boating

Ice boat championship racesThe ice offshore from UW-Green Bay was alive earlier this week with nearly 75 of the nation’s fastest ice boats contesting the DN Ice Yacht Racing Association’s North American Championship.

This year’s races were to have taken place on Lake Champlain at Colchester, Vt., until a snowstorm there forced the last-minute switch to lower Green Bay. Course officials rated the foot-thick ice in front of campus as a 7 on their 10-point scale: slick, fairly hard and snow-free, but with some rough patches. With the mostly glare ice and a 25-mph wind Monday afternoon, boats easily topped 50 mph downwind on the marked course and some neared 60.

This week’s racers are DN-class boats, so named after the Detroit News sponsored a competition in 1937 to design a boat for racing on ice. Most of the boats are hand-crafted of wood, 12 feet in length, with two side runners and a front runner.  The mast is about 16 feet high with a sail roughly 60 square feet in size.

The race headquarters Monday was located about one-quarter mile off shore from UW-Green Bay’s Lambeau Cottage. The shallow University Bay offered an area roughly three miles long and two miles wide for ice boating, bounded by open water of the shipping channel on the west and the open water of Pt. Sauble’s Frying Pan Shoals to the north.

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– Photos by Christopher Sampson, University Communication

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