It was the gathering of the ancients on Mecox Bay this weekend as iceboats were hauled out of sheds and barns for the first time in — well, the number of years since the ice was last thick enough for ice sailing was hot topic number one. The boats are by now antiques, even the “modern” Detroit Racers of the late 1970s, and the participants are mostly antique, too.
The iceboats got out there eight years back, yes, in 2015. Before that, the last time the iceboats gathered in numbers and the ice lasted as long as three days? That may have been back in 2011. Try telling a group of iceboaters that the climate hasn’t changed. Once upon a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was ice enough to host racing regattas on Mecox.
On Saturday, the crowd on the shore of Mecox wasn’t even a crowd. Two or three, or a half-dozen observers and participants at most, stood there in their mothball-smelling snowsuits looking south over the ice, over those few grand days. No strangers here. No lookie-loos. Mostly they were members of three die-hard local families from Southampton, Water Mill, and East Hampton. Memories were shared of the banner winters, 40 and 45 years ago, when the potato farmers of the South Fork raced over Poxabogue and Georgica Ponds and Hallock’s Bay with unbridled glee.
The potato farmers are few and far between in 2025, and the ice-going daredevils’ average age this weekend was, without exaggeration, probably about 65. It was glorious but almost painfully poignant to witness a grandfather and grandmother husband-and-wife pair in their 70s climb into a his-and-hers set of DNs and fly off on the wind.
Their teenage grandson was there, careening and careering back and forth on the westerly wind in a family-heirloom DN for hours, and a second teenager, too, getting his first thrilling taste of the sport. Everyone felt it: The possibility that, barring another global change in weather patterns, this was the last chance. The last time. The tradition hangs by the thinnest of threads, but it survives.