iceboat

noun, a lightly built boat with runners and a sail for travelling at speed over ice, esp. as a sport (COD, 1); see also ice punt

“When I was a youngster, I used to spend all my weekends on the ice all the time, because I was a sailor and I used to sail iceboats.”

“In the wintertime, head right for the iceboat, put the sails up, and away we went.”

“I guess I was a teenage kid at that time. And anyways I’ve got some pictures of that old iceboat someplace.”

“I had five iceboats, ice yachts, at one time.”

“Are you thinking of making a, you know, iceboat or something?”

“Oh, they had iceboats. I don’t know if it had a sail or not…”

“This one iceboat that I had belonged to J.B. Carruthers of Carruther’s wharf, and I had bought it for 35 dollars. It was in all good shape, but I still have the runners for it. So I had the one that came from Garden Island, and I also had this other one I found on Alfred Street in a barn, and this fellow sold it to me, so we put it on the ice, and we used to sail across over to here, and then we’d sail back to the yacht club and back and forth.

“He asked our uncle Tom, he lives there where Len is, for his iceboat the one day. And Tom says, ‘Oh yeah, you can have it’. He said, ‘You won’t need it. There’s lots of ice.’ You know one of those, you push on the handles, eh. We went to town, and of course it blew hard, and the ice slowed the ferry down and it never got back to Wolfe Island. It blew and it rained. We got up to Simcoe there; the iceboat went through about halfway across and never got back out. Yeah. And so he may have saved our life, eh, by giving us his iceboat. It wasn’t too big, but it was just right for two people or three.”