Black Ice

An Apostle Islands postcard

It was a sound I had never heard before on the big lake, and at least for a moment a sound I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to.

May 14th, 5:01am. The maiden voyage of the Little Dipper for the 2026 season. It was a few days later than I usually splash but the boat needed some work before being launched and still was not completely ready. Still, this would be the first run. First runs are always a little nerve-wracking anyway. You need to relearn the muscle memory of running a boat. Things that by mid-season you will be doing smoothly and efficiently are a bit herky-jerky. Knots take longer to untangle. You are tentative and relearning the dance.

On top of that, there was this disconcerting sound of the wind whistling in the hole where the port window used to be, now empty as a missing tooth until I can pick up the replacement I ordered after a crack developed late last season.

So, as beautiful as it was, I was a bit on edge, one reason I like to do first runs alone, and finely tuned to every sight and sound of the morning and the boat.

And then this: a sound like a dump truck dropping marbles.

I was cruising smoothly along the western edge of an island where the water in the bay was as still as dreamless sleep. It was cold (barely 32 degrees) and dark on the light lee side of the island with sunrise still a few minutes away. Suddenly, a sound like the world was cracking around me, horrifying, grating, unimaginably loud in the dark. I throttled down.

It stopped.

I throttled up. It started.

My first thought was mechanical. What catastrophic engine failure could produce a sound straight from the depth of a boater’s hell?

As I sat running through a mental checklist of disasters, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a sparkle in the growing light. Ice. The pack ice of winter was long gone but the night had been so cold, so still that an ultra-thin layer of new morning ice crusted the bay, so thin and so dark that it was nearly invisible on the water but each time the boat moved, the hull made a sound like boots on broken glass.

The sun came up. The black ice caught the first rays and began to sparkle on the water. What had at first seemed like an impending disaster suddenly tranformed into a moment of magic. I was afloat in a bay of diamonds. With the engine off, I could hear each small ripple chattering like wind chimes in the black ice.

I sat mesmerized by it, reminded how often what seems like disaster can turn out to be miraculous. Then, slowly, almost musically in the Little Dipper its hull singing the high notes through the layer of winter’s last song, I moved out of the bay and into the silky, silent waters of the coming summer.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).