compared to what most sailors are used to. As a puff hits the boat the mast and plank bend together as a dynamic system to automatically open the leech and tip the rig to leeward which drives the boat for- ward and provides more downforce onto the leeward runner. The key to speed in a DN is getting the mast, runner plank and sail set up to work properly together. Mast bend is good but too much bend robs the boat of power and pointing ability. Runner selection is another critical


Above: Harry Melges Jnr (Buddy’s father, right) wins his second Skeeter title in 1957. Left: not surprisingly when a soft water sailor steps onto the ice the biggest thing to get their head around is the rig. A well set-up DN rig appears wholly counterintuitive to someone used to trimming soft sails on the water – yet on the ice a rig like this goes like hell. Something more familiar to a ‘wet’ sailor is sail choice; at a DN championship two sails can be measured in with up to four design variants to choose from: Clear Ice Ultra – maximum top speed on perfect ice and in stronger winds; Clear Ice – high top end but for a wider range of ice and wind conditions; Medium – fuller for all-round use in uncertain conditions; Snow Master – lower maximum speed but fuller still for heavy sailors and bumpy ice/snow conditions. Sounds a lot, but a top DN sail can be bought for under €1,000. Not cheap but less than two-thirds the cost of that little Etchells jib…


the skipper lies down in. It is 3.7m long, 500mm wide and must weigh at least 21kg. The 2.4m-wide runner plank is bolted perpendicular to the fuselage and provides stability to the boat. Both the fuselage and plank must be


made of wood but fibreglass may be added for reinforcement. The boat rides on three skates (called runners). Each sailor is allowed to use up to nine different runners during a regatta. We carry different runners for different


ice and wind conditions. The front runner is connected to an aft-facing tiller through a linkage which is used to steer the boat. A 4.9m rotating mast supports the 5.6m2 fully battened Dacron sail. The mast is held up with two side stays and a headstay. Two different sails are allowed to be used during a regatta. All up the boat weighs around 70kg. Portability is a major contributing factor in the success of the class. The DN slowly evolved over the decades


but the one change that triggered a quan- tum leap in performance was the introduc- tion of composite bendy masts in the late 1990s. Before that


time aluminium


extruded masts and later wood/composite hybrid were the accepted and class-legal construction methods. But as the sailors figured out that bendy was fast the failure rates of those rigs was becoming alarm- ingly high. So finally, without much choice, the class decided to allow full composite construction. It was this change that turned the DN into the modern hot rod that you see ripping around frozen lakes today. The DN platform may seem like a totally


baffling and foreign concept to those who have never sailed one. However, the boat is really pretty simple. While sailing you have


a tiller and a mainsheet in your hands. There are no other controls to deal with or worry about. This is a good thing while sailing in a fleet of up to 50 boats at speeds sometimes over 100km/hour. There are a lot of quick tactical and boat-handling decisions at these speeds so you need to have your head out of the boat to a degree rarely required of water sailors. As with all sailboats, speed is a trade-off


between power and drag. The needs of a DN are extreme because of the range of speeds across which performance must be optimised. A DN’s speed needs to be max- imised from a dead stop at the start of a race up to super high speeds down the reaches. Let’s start at the start… Before the start


of a race all of the boats line up along a physical starting line at equally spaced numbered starting blocks. Skippers stand behind the runner plank with one hand holding the tiller and partially trimmed sheet, the other holding the weather shroud. All of the boats on the right side of the centreline are laid off on port tack, the left side boats on starboard tack. The PRO stands in front of the fleet and holds a starting flag. At his signal sailors run like hell pushing the boat and jump in before the boat leaves them behind. During this running push start the sail


needs to be deep and powerful to provide acceleration at low speed. The mast is rela- tively straight and luff curve in the sail provides depth. As the boat accelerates the sheet is slowly trimmed as the apparent wind builds. Both the sheet and wind forces help to induce mast bend which flattens the sail. Eventually the sheet gets too blocked and off you go. The range of mast bend is extreme


factor in minimising drag and maximising speed. The class specs allow sailors to play around with runner length, crown shape, steel thickness, sharpness and ice contact angle. Ice temperature, bumpiness, snow cover and wind strength all factor into runner choices for every race. Through the day the ice racing surface is constantly changing back and forth which with the multiple short race format means that competitors have plenty of opportunity to make changes between races. The mental part of iceboat racing is


definitely another difference over soft water sailing. During a race your adrena- line is cranking and rapid split-second boat handling and tactical decisions are con- stantly being made. Then once the finish line is crossed there is generally lots of time to second guess your set-up and runner selection ready for the next heat. The flipside to all this, as I hinted at the


start, is that finding good ice can be incred- ibly challenging (best not to buy a car from a DN sailor, the mileage can be off the clock). This makes it nearly impossible to get in much practice time throughout a typical winter. Because of this it takes lots of time (years) to gain enough experience to build confidence in your tuning and runner choices on any given day. I grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and


did all of my sailing on Lightnings and keel boats on Lake Michigan. Even though Wisconsin is an epicentre for ice boating I knew very little about it until I started my engineering career at Harken. I got my first iceboat ride on Pewaukee


Lake in the mid 1990s. The head of sales at Harken at the time, Marty Rieck, and his wife Suzy owned several iceboats including a pretty fast DN. They loved to invite people to try the sport for the first time. On that day I got a taste of the speed and intricacies of iceboating which really piqued my interest. Shortly after that longtime Sheboygan


friend Mark Wessel and I decided to build DNs. We bought plans from Joe Norton, DN iceboating guru and master wood boatbuilder from Green Lake, Wisconsin. Joe has built and sold hundreds of DN hulls and had also produced a really nice set of plans and build instructions. Mark and I invested in some lumber,


Gougeon epoxy of course. And plenty of beer. The basement of the house that Mark was renting became our boatbuild- ing shop. Not really knowing what we were doing we slowly built two hulls and


SEAHORSE 41


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