Move Over, Olympics-Iceboating Is the Hottest Sport

""Whether it's climate change or what, I don't know," Jack Mulvihill, an avid iceman, said recently. "We haven't had cold winters.""

""it's a very fickle sport," as an ex-commodore from the rival Hudson River Ice Yacht Club put it."

""They just called it the Commodore Trophy," Mulvihill said. "Nobody knew what the hell it was. They took it up to Tiffany's one day in the nineteen-seventies when there was no ice, and they had it appraised. We almost fell off our chairs.""

The Navesink River only freezes occasionally, yet Red Bank hosts one of the world's only dedicated iceboating clubhouses, serving as a museum to the pastime. Jack Mulvihill noted a lack of cold winters, though the current winter produced severe wind chill and an imminent race risked postponement from gale-force gusts. Mulvihill guarded the Van Nostrand Challenge Cup, won by the North Shrewsbury club in 1891 and commissioned by Gardiner Van Nostrand. Iceboating once captivated turn-of-the-century sportswriters but later waned; club members once mistook the cup's origin, briefly calling it the Commodore Trophy and having it appraised in the 1970s.

Read at The New Yorker