GeoffS's blog

To the south, there was the main pits area for the NIYA:

      
(click "View Original" to see the full-size photo)

... and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses ...

Matt Struble's two throwouts in the NACRA F-17 North American Championship regtta were a third and first.

  'nuff said.

Cheers,

Geoff S.

More photos.

Skip Boston, DN US 150, passed away during the night of August 15, 2005.

A week ago a few of us visited Dan Hearn here in Madison to talk about building the 4-Lakes Jr. Iceboating Program. While we were there we got to see Dan's building jig. He designed it to be flexible enough to loft and build both full-size DNs and the Opti-DNs (or ice-Optis, if you prefer):
[image:1189]

After seeing his setup Byron Tetzlaff and I decided it was the way to go for our building plans. We may be building slightly different sized boats (min/max length, different cockpit widths, maybe even an Opti), so the flexibility of Dan's setup of screw-down blocks seemed ideal.

My personal measure for the "goodness" of spring (and fall, for that matter) is how long I have to wait between the last iceboating and the first soft-water sailing.

The sailing season is done (at least on the hardwater), so that means the building season is started!

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Yesterday we decided to get a couple of photos of our boats with the State Capitol building in the backround.

More to follow as I can get them uploaded.

I was going over my boat looking for some spike-marks to fill and I found that one of the sideboards had started to split! Some unexpected quality time in the shop this week...

Probably that rough ice last Friday.

Cheers,

Geoff S.
US-5156

Here are a few quotes about the GC regatta published in the various Madison media last week (names removed to protect the misquoted):

"When I was 16, I raced everything I could, motorcycles, cars. But as I grew older I discovered those were just things I did until I discovered iceboating. This is a blast."

"You can't be picky, this is probably one of the nicest pieces of ice in the country right now."

"This is probably the last place in the world to iceboat today."

"We've been here nine days and this is the first day of the regatta. It is sometimes very frustrating to wait on the ice."

At the swap meet here this fall, Paul Goodwin remarked that one downside of the water-soluble "Blue Juice" cutting fluid is that it will freeze. I stored that little factoid away in my mind, and decided I'd keep my WD-40 soaked stones in the "on the ice" toolkit, and the blue-juice ones in the shop.

Well, the best laid plans, etc. I loaded up the car with spare parts and extra tools for the Western Challenge regatta and took my stoning bench and shop-stones with me. They went into the hotel room for post-race runner-tuning, and all was good. I got home late Sunday night and postponed cleaning out the car for a couple of days... Guess what happened!

Ever since I got burned at the NAs last year by aligning my runners with an out of whack set of aligners, I've been thinking about how to align my chocks without relying on a "gold standard" fixture. Optically seems to be the only way to go to align things from "first principles".

Iceboating.net:
    http://www.iceboating.net
(of course!)

Iceboat.org - 4 Lakes Ice Yacht Club:
    http://www.iceboat.org

DN Bulletin Board:
    http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/DNboard/DNmain.html

Yahoo! Iceboating Group:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IceBoating/

MSN Landsailer and Iceboat Design and Construction Group:
    http://groups.msn.com/LandsailerandIceboatdesignandconstruction

Tom Speer's Home-Page:
    http://www.tspeer.com/

While I love my DN, here in the 4-Lakes club the Renegade is king (there are typically more than 20 boats on the line for a club race). So, last summer I bought a "fixer upper" Renegade. The original hope was to have it ready for the 03-04 season, but my day-job and other stuff happened and it's still sitting Jim Nordahus' shop as a work-in-progress. I'll try and keep a running commentary on the work as the boat progresses to sailable condition.

I raced in the DN North American Regatta for the first time this year. I thought I'd share the experience. Originally, this was a in a combination of forward and reverse time-sequence; I edited the pieces into chronological order.

For some more of my ramblings (and a few photos), check the web page created by Debbie Whitehorse (the 4-Lakes Ice Yacht Club's webmaster) from e-mailed reports and photos during the regatta:

http://iceboat.org/images/03-04/dnna/dnna.htm

(Thanks Debbie!)