Skating

Living here in the winter sort of puts a demand on you to seize the day if you want to make use of the winter activities on offer. Sometimes it can be a matter of hours between getting a chance to go skiing or skating or not. I've been busy with other things during daylight hours in the weekend, when there was proper frost, enough to put some skateable surface on the lake by the bog. Last friday there was mostly open water here but then we had cold weather and some snow so yesterday, there were quite a lot of people here. The lake is no more then 50-60 cm deep so it freezes rather quickly. Tomorrow afternoon we're having milder weather and rain so skating is happening NOW. As you can see in the extra there is a lot of live water running towards the lake too.

It's been two years since the last time and it took the first ten minutes to get used to the skates and finding the rhythm again. After that I had a lovely hour and a half of skating. As you can see there is some snow on the ice and it was snowing a bit while it was forming. This means the ice develops "goosebumps", it's not perfectly smooth as it can be when there's frost without snow and the skates are clattering against the surface. During the best of conditions you have black, smooth ice in front of you, sometimes you can even see the bottom, and the feeling is like flying. The skates makes hardly any noise against the ice, just a gentle hissing while you fly away. I have proper ice-poles, or ski-poles for ice conditions, that makes you gain quite a high speed, which can actually be a nuisance if you have the wind in your back ending up a long way from where you started. Then you have to get back again facing the wind...