Sports on Ice Are Feeling Under the Weather

MEREDITH, N.H. -- New Englanders have a lot of names for bad ice: They call it "rotten ice" if it's weak like decaying wood, "crispy ice" if it crackles beneath their boots, and "candle ice" if, as it thaws, it starts to show opaque streaks that look like candles on their sides.

Now that January -- usually full of deep-freezing, ice-making days -- has passed by mild and rainy, anybody who looks hard enough could probably find all three kinds of the bad stuff here on massive Lake Winnipesaukee.

Plus, a fair amount of the worst ice of all: open water.

"It's very, very, very unusual," said Patrick Nealon, a fishing guide, looking out at the lake's Meredith Bay last week.

On the day he spoke, the bay was supposed to be gearing up for the 4,000-angler Great Rotary Fishing Derby. This is an annual festival of frozen leisure at which people have been known to haul full bars, charcoal grills and even a pool table out to shantytowns on the lake.

"There'd be hot-dog stands and T-shirt stands, and all kinds of novelty items" for sale, all out on the ice -- if this were a regular year, Nealon said.

Instead, on this day the bay's slushy and puddly surface supported just two shanties, one of them still within an emergency leap of the shore. A red-lettered sign warned: "ICE CONDITION UNKNOWN."

"None of that stuff is out here yet," Nealon said, thinking of the derby preparations, "because the ice is the way it is."

That's the way it is now all over northern New England, where ice -- thick, glacial-blue sheets of it -- is usually a reliable and celebrated part of winter life. When the weather turns frigid, it's like the ground gets bigger here, with such activities as camping, stock-car racing and airplane landings happening out on the region's frozen lakes.

Not this year. The ice that everybody's counting on hasn't appeared.

"It's just messed up everything," said Jim Eldridge, who sells bait to ice fishermen in Laconia, N.H.

The problem, as Washingtonians also know, is that this January did not act like January on the East Coast. In Boston, the average temperature last month was a little over 36 degrees -- more than seven degrees above normal. Farther north in Burlington, Vt., January was even more abnormal, 10.2 degrees too warm.