Sports on Ice Are Feeling Under the Weather

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 6, 2006

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.

Forecasters say the fault lay with the jet stream. Instead of blowing frigidly in from the north, the dominant flow was more directly west to east, bringing along wetter, warmer, Pacific weather.

"Normal climate variability," a government forecaster called it.

People around here have called it other things.

"It's been a real brown winter. . . . Not good for anything," said David Emerson, a Laconia pilot who flies over Lake Winnipesaukee to check its ice conditions.

Because of the warmth, some snowmobiling trails have faded to bare ground, and at the Killington ski resort, cross-country skiers have been spotted around the downhill slopes -- refugees from the snow-poor regions below. But the best measure of the region's temperate winter might be lake ice, which requires cold, still weather to congeal properly.

In more frigid years along Lake Champlain, this ice can make a shelf 18 inches thick.

This year, "you couldn't find enough to put in a shot glass between here and New York," said Petty Officer Brad Hanson, second in command at the U.S. Coast Guard station in Burlington, which sits at the lake's widest and most ice-resistant section.

And even where there is ice, locals say, it's often too weak to support a person, much less a pickup truck or the fully equipped "bobhouses" that ice fishermen spend their time in.

That's bad enough if you're an ice fisherman. But it's worse if, like restaurateur George Jarvis, you do a good business making pizzas for delivery to shanties out on the lake.

"I don't think there's going to be any ice fishing this year," said Jarvis, whose restaurant is in the Champlain town of Port Henry, N.Y.

Across the region, everybody who depends on ice has had to make changes. At New Hampshire's International Mountain Climbing School, they're used to climbing on the giant blue icicles that form when waterfalls freeze. But now, in some places, the water's still falling.

"We have a lot of climbs that are just pouring water right now," said head guide Brad White.

As the warm days piled up, New Hampshire's stock-cars-on-ice race was postponed. The Lake Champlain Ice Fishing Championship was canceled altogether. And then, on Wednesday night, Meredith Rotary Club officials made the difficult decision to postpone their derby by a week. They said 75 percent of "Lake Winni" was still not safe for fishing.

Still, there was hope here: Real February weather was in the forecast.

"Cold air's going to come in next week," said Alan Nute, who owns a bait shop in Meredith. "It's only going to take one more cold snap," he said, to fix the ice.