The Wind I Killed Was the One I Made

DN Iceboat Sailing 🎮 Play: Hard Water Reach

The kid lapped me twice before I accepted that the boat was not broken.

He was maybe ten, in a snowmobile suit, and his father’s DN went past mine like I was a bollard. Mine sat there. Twelve feet of Baltic birch and Dacron, one helmeted forty-something lying nearly flat with his chin on the deck, sheet cranked in hard, willing the thing forward through sheer disappointment. The wind was up — a steady ten, fifteen knots, whitecaps-on-water weather if there’d been any water — and the lake was a two-kilometre plate of black ice with a skiff of drift snow feathering across it. Perfect conditions, I was told. And I was going nowhere.

Someone from the curling rink had put me onto this. Not Fran — a quieter man at the far end of the ice who overheard me asking why a rock curls the wrong way and said, deadpan, that if I liked ice I should come see what it does at forty klicks an hour. He lent me his old wooden DN and a helmet that smelled of decades of other people’s fear.

Here is the thing I did wrong, and it took me an embarrassing hour to see it. I had the sheet — the rope that controls sail angle — hauled in as tight as it would go, because that felt like more power. It is the opposite. A sail is an aerofoil, and hauling the sheet in past a certain point drives the angle of attack too high and the whole thing stalls, exactly the way a wing stalls when you pull the nose up too far. Instead of clean airflow generating lift, you get a stalled panel generating drag and a sad flapping noise. I was flying the boat at the top of the buffet and calling it a headwind.

I only found it because I’d made almost precisely this mistake before, in the air, with a kite. When I built that sport kite back in July it kept hauling left off every launch, and I burned an hour changing four things at once before the real fault — two flying lines unequal by four centimetres, holding one wingtip at a higher angle of attack — finally surfaced. The lesson that stuck wasn’t about kites. It was: change one thing, watch what it does. So on the ice I forced myself to stop hauling and just ease the sheet out, a hand’s width, and do nothing else.

The boat lurched and began to accelerate.

Not gently. It loaded up under me with a low grinding hum from the runners and the drift snow started coming past in streaks, and then — this is the part I still don’t quite have my head around — as it sped up, the wind on my face swung forward, from the side to nearly dead ahead. That’s apparent wind, the vector sum of the true wind and the wind the boat makes by moving. A DN will do three times the speed of the true wind, and once it’s up to pace the apparent wind is always coming from in front, so you sheet the sail in again to match. There’s a control loop hiding in there that I now understand intellectually and cannot yet fly: sheet in to accelerate, but not so far you stall; the faster you go, the further forward the wind pulls, so the trim you wanted two seconds ago is already wrong. Get it right and you outrun the thing pushing you. Get it wrong and you stall, slow, the apparent wind falls back aft, and it feels for all the world like the breeze just died. It didn’t. You killed it.

I got one good run. Maybe four hundred metres, genuinely quick, the shoreline moving with an urgency that no canoe has ever given me. Then I came to a patch of harder wind-packed snow-ice I hadn’t read, tried to bear away across it, and the steel runners — which want to be scraped sharp to bite, and which I had not sharpened because they aren’t mine and I didn’t dare — simply let go. The boat pivoted, the stern came round, and I did a slow undignified spin to a stop, lying flat, staring up at a pale sky.

Reading that ice is the whole safety game before it’s the speed game, and I can’t read it yet. Black ice, snow-ice, drift, the darker seam of a pressure ridge — the curling sheet is a painted floor by comparison. I lay there a while. My hands had gone past cold into that stupid wooden numbness, which is its own beginner’s mistake: you’re doing highway speeds in a wind of your own making, and it isn’t effort that stops you, it’s your fingers. I unclipped, walked the boat back by hand, and gave it up for the day with the loop half-solved and the runners no sharper than when I’d started.