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Water came pumping up and the ice cracking in a spider web pattern and bowing concave. But before my skate crashed completely through I had shifted my weight to the other skate and as it slit through the ice, I moving quite fast, shifted again to the other skate, as I skirted toward the shore and mud bank which I stepped onto just barely. Sometimes certain sections of ice were later in freezing than others and thus thinner. Across the bay I was skating with other kids in town and we were skating across a very recently frozen thin section of ice. The object was to skate as fast as possible in an arc getting on and off as fast possible the ice cracking in long web patterns trying to see how far out we could go without breaking through.
One of the kids went to far and the ice broke under him and he sunk down like a water skier having let go of the rope. Somebody went and got a long branch for him to grab and so we could try to pull him out from a safe distance. But every-time he tried to crawl out, the ice would break under him. He had to break ice all the way to shore some forty feet or so, by pulling his upper body onto the top of the ice so that his weight would break out maybe a four foot section. The water was not very deep so that there was not much chance of a drowning.
Another advantage of thin ice was clarity. Most of the year the water was opaque, in the spring muddy, in the summer still unclear and sometimes green with alga.
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