There will be no Four Lakes Ice Yacht Club racing the weekend of January 17-18.
We’re seeing a familiar pattern set up again: light snow that keeps accumulating, followed eventually by rain and warmer temperatures that reset the lake. Right now, we’re at the beginning of that cycle with enough fresh snow on the ice to keep us off of it.
If the pattern holds, we’ll get our Zamboni back. It’s already been working overtime this year.
This weekend is officially a shop weekend. Get into the shop, tune the boats, and be ready when the ice comes back.
Iceboaters remain, as always, hopelessly optimistic.
Speaking of shops…
A crew out of Damien Luyet’s shop has been busy building six mini skeeters, boats that are equally happy on ice or converted for land sailing.
The only unresolved issue is branding. The group is currently split between Midwest Dirt Dudes and Midwest Dirt Devils.
Tim and Peter McCormick on Lake Kegonsa. Photo: Ethan Brodsky
It’s been a while since we’ve had a meeting. We missed the last one because it fell on New Year’s Eve, so tonight gets us back on our regular every-other-Wednesday schedule.
We’ll meet tonight at 6:30 PM at the Breakwater. There’s a lot to catch up on, recent activity on Kegonsa, regattas being called on, and what the next stretch of the season may look like.
Breakwater is generously letting us use their room. Please consider coming early, grabbing dinner, and supporting them.
What to Know:
4LIYC Meeting
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
6:30 PM
Breakwater Restaurant & Bar
6308 Inland Way, Monona, WI
Link to video
As decisions are made today on whether the NIYA, ISA, the Nite Nationals (and now the DN Western Region Championship) are called on or postponed, here’s a short clip from Tuesday afternoon on Lake Winnebago, with the stern steerer WISCONSIN stretching her legs in strong wind.
Andy Gratton, who shared the video, put it best:
The video doesn’t do justice to how the sun shimmered off all the little ripples on the many puddles due to the strong winds today. It almost looked like we were sailing on water, not ice.
The video was taken from WISCONSIN by Andy’s son-in-law, David School.
Iceboating is a bit like Goldilocks; we need conditions to be just right. Right now, we have too many ice holes.
Last weekend, snow on Lake Kegonsa kept us off the ice. This week’s rain and warm temperatures cleared much of that snow, but the same weather also created too many drain holes for safe sailing. Saturday’s forecast includes some snow, followed by colder temperatures. A few club members plan to check the lake again early Sunday morning to assess conditions and determine whether scrub racing is possible. Next update for 4LIYC racing is January 16.
Here’s the ice report straight from Damien:
The Zamboni has done a good job on Kegonsa snow cover. If not for iced drifts 1-1.5” tall, the surface would be an 8-9, but the inclusions bring that down to a roughish ride likely so 5-6. The landing is still good. The main issue is the holes! Any ice fishing hole from the last 2 weeks is open and growing. There are series of them that would eat a whole iceboat runner.
While we wait for Mother Nature’s super Zamboni to finish its work, with rain turning to snow over the next couple of days, there is time to look backward. A dive into the Daily Cardinal archives turned up an unexpected addition to Madison’s iceboating story.
The recent post about the UW student film Not Responsible led me into the University of Wisconsin newspaper The Daily Cardinal archives. While looking for references tied to the film, I started poking around more broadly to see what the paper had written about iceboating.
Iceboating appears in the Daily Cardinal from the late nineteenth century onward, and by the 1920s it was treated as routine winter life on campus. Boats were raced, rented, and rarely explained to readers. The paper assumed its audience already understood what iceboats were and how they fit into life on Lake Mendota.
One of the things I found along the way was a small but important addition to the Charles Lindbergh story in Madison.
For years, Lindbergh’s connection to iceboating here has been told through a story that centers on the motorized ice craft he helped build on Lake Mendota in 1921, powered by a motorcycle engine geared to an airplane propeller. That account is well documented, and it still stands.
What the Daily Cardinal archive adds is one more fact. In a 1929 article reflecting on Lindbergh’s Wisconsin years, the paper notes, without emphasis, that he owned an iceboat while he was a student. Iceboating was part of ordinary winter life on Lake Mendota at the time.
Lindbergh’s motorized iceboat looks like an extension of something he already understood well, speed on ice.
Family context helps explain why. Lindbergh’s maternal grandmother was a Lodge from Detroit, and his cousin Joe Lodge (part of the trio who designed the DN) was an active iceboater there. Detroit, like Madison, was a center of iceboating and mechanical experimentation in the early twentieth century. Iceboats there were not just raced but modified, tuned, and pushed. Lindbergh arrived in Madison already comfortable with machines, ice, and speed.
A later source adds more to Lindbergh’s connection to iceboating. In Evolution of Modern Sailboat Design, Meade Gougeon notes that Lindbergh is said to have assisted his cousin Joe Lodge with the design of a highly advanced rig installed on the Class A stern steerer DEUCE II in the mid 1930s. The boat featured a rotating wing mast believed to be the first of its kind. Although DEUCE II suffered repeated rigging failures, the concept carried forward, and Lodge went on to win the Stuart Cup and Hearst International Trophy in 1938 with the rebuilt DEUCE III. The account suggests that Lindbergh’s interest in iceboating did not end in Madison, but extended into later experimentation at the highest level of the sport.
Daily Cardinal, February 22, 1929
Joe Lodge, holding an iceboat runner, with Fritz Jungbluth in Detroit, 1937. Lodge was a cousin of Charles Lindbergh. Photo from the Bernard scrapbook collection.
Motorized iceboat likely powered by a Ford Model T engine. This is a separate experiment from Lindbergh’s motorized ice craft.
