It was Dec. 29 and Calumet Island resident Mike Lamothe was in a festive spirit. The holidays were winding to a close but he was still ready to spread Christmas cheer. So when he spotted a large circular ice floe spinning lazily in the Ottawa River just below the Calumet bridge, he knew he had to do something.
Donning cold-weather clothes and a flotation device, he grabbed his canoe, a tree and some decorations and took to the water. His brother Walter and sister-in-law Gaetane Vermette supervised from the shore with a video camera.
Paddling out to the disk, he cautiously tested the ice thickness with a pole before venturing out onto the floe.
“I always use a pole, like as a probe so I always know it’s safe,” he explained. “I don’t go on blind faith because that’s how people drown … It takes at least two inches to support a person, at least a person my size, I’m not too heavy. Any less than two inches and the pole will go right through.”
After ensuring his safety, he grabbed a drill and created a stand for the evergreen he’d brought along, which he then decorated with tinsel. The display rotated slowly on the massive platter of ice, the last festive gasp of the 2018 holidays before the start of the new year.
Lamothe said that rotating ice floes of that size are fairly rare, as they are created by a very specific set of preconditions.
“When you get the right water conditions, the right levels, the right temperatures, the right time, then sometimes it freezes in a circle,” he said. “It’s rare, I’ve been watching it eight years since the last time it formed.”
Scientists have researched the strange phenomenon of spinning ice disks and discovered that their cause is a little counterintuitive. They typically form in eddies, which are little spinning currents formed by rocks or an enclosed area, though not always.
Water is most dense when it is just above freezing, which means that ice melting off the centre of the disk will travel straight down. Warmer water around the floe will cause a bigger density difference and cause the water to fall more rapidly. If there is any sideways motion in the water, it will begin to spin like a whirlpool and rotate the ice above it.
Lamothe said that he put up a tree the last time the spinning happened, but the rapidly changing temperatures put an early end to his fun.
“I had one, oh about eight years ago now, but it only lasted two days,” he said. “There was a big wind that came up and the waves broke all the ice. I lost my tree, I had silver lights on it.”
This year Lamothe was able to recover his tree after the floe floated downstream near the Bryson shoreline.
“I just went down and removed the tree because it
moved downstream and stuck to the mainland ice,” he said. “It was all electric lights and that and I didn’t want it going into the river.”
Lamothe explained that he has many years of experience on the ice through several decades of fishing and trapping, and advised amateurs against trying something similar.
“People say, ‘Oh you’re brave,’ I’m not brave I’ve been doing this for 40 years, you know,” he said. “I don’t want to put anybody at risk… so I just do it on my own.”
He said that if the spinning floe reappears in the next few years, he will likely try to up the ante.
“I was going to go down and set up a tent and camp on it overnight. That would have been the ultimate,” he said with a laugh. “One of my cousins said, ‘You know a guy could sit on the edge and trawl in the winter.’”
Lamothe’s adventure can be viewed on his YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_
continue=246&v=HpyypmGqHwo
by Caleb Nickerson
