Eighty DN iceboaters from across the country plus a few from Germany, Poland and Australia showed up on Dead Lake in northern Minnesota for the year's first regatta, the Western Challenge.
The regatta is organized as an informal weekend of testing and tuning
after an off-season of purchasing or building "new stuff." Unusual to most sailing regattas, the fast guys in the Gold Fleet spend a lot of their time dispensing information on how to tune and sail faster. (Imagine any regatta where people openly share their info.) The above picture, Drift Blast, is a shot of two boats rounding the leeward mark at 50 mph. The trailing boat is blasting through one of the snowdrifts that continued to build through the day.

After a mild day on Friday with temps in the 20's and moderate winds, it blew stink on Saturday with temps in the single digits. A flurry of overnight snow continued to pile up in drifts on the lake throughout the day eventually leaving the sheet of ice very fast, but fairly dangerous. Scrub racing became the order of the day. The picture to the left is fairly symbolic of iceboaters looking like penguins while waiting between races. What the shot doesn't demonstrate is how the snow was just flying across the service of the ice.

With a report of fresh, clear ice on another lake, the majority of the
fleet packed up at 6 AM Sunday morning, drove 180 miles south and set up for a day of great racing on Buffalo Lake, near Minneapolis. See Iceboating.net for results.

12/13/06