Saturday, January 05, 2008

And it begins

The weather service suspends doing a lake forecast from December 31 until May 1. Luckily they are still posting conditions from the several automatic data collection sites. Today,

"THE LAKE CHAMPLAIN LAKE LEVEL AT THE KING STREET FERRY DOCK IN BURLINGTON
WAS 96.84 FEET...AND THE WATER TEMPERATURE WAS 34 DEGREES."

Yet there is some ice around, blown and packed into the downwind end of each bay we went through today, typically in dinner plate size chunks and extending maybe a couple hundred feet from shore. Here Tom is pulling himself across the ice pack with nailboards strapped to his hands.





Rumor has it the shallow bays at the north end of the lake are frozen solid and they are having some ice boating event tomorrow.

There was also more snow packed down on the boat ramp, so instead of getting in the boat by the shore and seal-launching, I could start a good 30-40 feet back without scraping on any pavement. Kayaking isn't just about water anymore!

We had a couple of days this week of zeroish temperatures that gave this ice formation a bit of a kick. It was also blowing pretty well, so the decorative lakeside ice really took off. What you see here was all formed from waves and spray from the cold north wind. South wind today, so this is sheltered and the camera can come out of the waterproof box.



That's me! Thanks to Tom who managed to press the shutter button on my camera with neoprene mittens on. I've been wearing gloves which are a bit easier.






After the big waves, the little ones have the final say, shoeing icicles that get too close.




A video of Tom's ice-pushing:


2 comments:

bonnie said...

Beautiful!

Are things thawing out today?

Don said...

Oh yes. It's around 50 out for the next couple of days' high, and we should get a good day of rain in there before it gets cold again.

More snow on the weekend though.

I'm curious to see how much of those icicles survive the thaw.