Arctic Bay (the body of water) is frozen over now, roughly on schedule. You can usually count on it freezing right around Thanksgiving. Wednesday morning awoke to calm winds, and you could just make out the grey ice forming on the surface, by Wednesday afternoon when I was on my way to the airport most of the surface of the bay was a thin sheet of new ice. As Thursday was still calm we were getting a good layer of ice all over the bay, and by the looks of things on most of Adam’s Sound, out to Admiralty Inlet. By this morning it was a good four inches of ice, although the hunters were still chugging through it with their boats.
A gale has sprung up with the onset of evening tonight, and we’ve got a good south wind at around 20 knots, so it remains to be seen if there is still a smooth sheet of ice out there in the morning. Little wind at freeze up makes all the difference in the world for smooth traveling for the rest of the year.
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Geez and I thought it was cold when I saw a thin sheet of ice on the car this morning… 🙂
Turns out I was wrong, the bright moonlight just made the dew look like ice. Heh.
I never really thought about what wind would do to water that was in the process of freezing. Anything larger than a very small pond just never freezes around here, or at least very rarely.
We now expect we might have our first frost this Wednesday night–freeze up in Arctic Bay puts it in perspective.