Last Ride of 2007

Today I pulled my bike out of the basement for the last ride of the year. With rain last night and cold temps this morning, I figured Walled Lake would have ice boat activity. The plan was to take a few pics of the boats racing, run across the lake, then do the small loop on the Novi lake shore single track.

My camera went dead after two pics so I don't have much to offer. There were as many as 30 boats racing on the lake. I dropped in on Bruce and Di for a bit and he managed to snap one off as I approached from the lake. As I continued my run across the lake I encountered a large open water hole just five feet in front of me. I slowly backed up and ran around the hole. The boats were racing within feet of the hole, they must have know it was there, but they weren't leaving much of a margin for safety. It was surprising to find the hole in the middle of the lake, as the ice was generally over a foot thick in most places.

I made my way across the lake and to the trail. My first epic wipe out was 10 feet after the trail head. There was hardly any snow on the ground, but the single track itself had a solid glaze of ice as far as I could see into the woods. I tried to stay off the ice, unsuccessfully.. I decided that would be it for the ride. I turned around and made it as far as the parking lot, where I encountered the classic pavement - ice - pavement combination, which threw me over the handlebars into a perfect three point slide for about 15 feet of parking lot\ice, at which point I met the next ice to pavement transition area, which then abruptly stopped my slide phase of the fall. While man and machine made it through without incident, I was carrying my camera in the zipper pocket near the small of my back, and as I cartwheeled, all I kept thinking was this is going to hurt. I managed to not come down on the camera, but decided that I need to find a better way to carry it from now, for my sake and for that of the life of the camera.

This is about the fourth year I told myself I would buy an ice boat, but once the lake freezes over, there are no longer any boats on the market. So I'm going to start looking in August next year.