The winter storm and arctic chill that’s driven scores of New Yorkers indoors has given two retired FDNY firefighters a reason to head outside.
Queens ice boat enthusiasts, Dan Mundy, 88, and his son Dan Mundy Jr., 62, have waited over a decade to enjoy the thrill of sailing over a frozen Jamaica Bay at breakneck speeds — a beloved pastime they’ve shared since the 1960s.
“Every year when the cold would come, you’d say, ‘Okay, is this going to be the year?’” Mundy Jr. told the News. “The last twelve years went by, and we never really had good ice. Right now we have very thick ice, so it’s a great opportunity.”
Like sailboats, ice boats are wind-powered, but sit upon three ice blades. Where a sailboat’s speed is somewhat constrained by the friction of water, ice boats can easily reach 50 miles-per-hour with a big blast of wind, Mundy Jr. said.
“It’s a very exhilarating run. It’s a thrill,” he said. “You need a good hard surface and then you need the wind to blow. So those things have to line up. And then when it does you just try to stay out there, and enjoy it as long as you can.”
Before breaking out the boat, they measure the ice, making sure it’s at least a solid six inches thick, Mundy Jr. explained. Once they’re sailing, they stay within a couple hundred yards from the shore, steering clear of any areas where the ice could be thinner — and possibly break.
“You always take precautions, we keep either some ice picks or spikes with the idea being, if you fell through, you have to claw up out of the ice,” he said.
Mundy Jr. said more than two dozen curious neighbors have come out to hitch a ride on their two-seater— the only ice boat out on the frozen wetland estuary this season.
As an arctic cold front moves over the tri-state area this weekend, with below zero wind chills forecasted with the possibility of more snow, the Mundys hope to get two more days of riding in.
“It’s going to be good ice and it’s going to be windy. It just might be too much. If the wind exceeds like 40 miles an hour, it’ll just flip you over. So that’s the challenge,” Mundy Jr. said.
The duo’s winter escapade was first reported by The Wave.
The past week of riding brought back fond memories for Mundy Jr. and his father— a retired FDNY captain, and founder of preservation group, the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers.
The elder Mundy learned to build ice boats as a teenager, growing up in Broad Channel, a small working-class neighborhood where ice boating was a longstanding community hobby.
“I think people used to be out of their houses a lot more than they are now. There were three channels on the TV, no social media, no phones. It was like, ‘What are we doing here? Let’s get out and do something,” Mundy Jr. said.
“[My father] was always one of the leading people back in the day in terms of building the ice boats, giving advice on it, teaching people how to run them,” the son continued. “So he has a lot of history on it. Now, he’s 88 years old, and he’s out there ice boating across Jamaica Bay at 50 miles an hour. So that’s a pretty unusual story.”
Mundy Jr. said he has vivid memories of riding in his father’s ice boat as young as five years old, watching more than a dozen other boats racing back and forth across the frozen bay.
“The first time you go out… it scares the crap out of you. You’re flying across the ice, and every once in a while, you go up in the air on one blade,” he said. “As a kid, you’re thinking, ‘Okay this is the end here.’”
Nowadays he said he sits back and enjoys the view.
“The natural beauty of the ice is just amazing, particularly with the sunsets over here and looking at the city skyline as a backdrop,” Mundy Jr. said. “It really juxtaposes very interestingly. Here we are on frozen ice and look at that. It’s a great experience.”
