Epoxy

Lake Winnipesaukee

Alton, New Hampshire, USA

Also known as Winnipesaukee, Alton Bay, Lakes Region, Weirs Beach

Winter ends here when one man in a small plane says it does.

Ice-Out on Winnipesaukee is declared when the M/S Mount Washington could reach all five of her ports: Alton Bay, Wolfeboro, Center Harbor, Weirs Beach and Meredith. Not when she does, and not when the lake is clear. When the pilot judges that she could. Dave Emerson flies over two or three times a day as the season turns and makes the call.

Records go back to 1887, kept originally so the steamer companies knew when the lanes reopened. The average date sits around April 20. The latest was 12 May 1888, the second year anyone was counting. The earliest was 17 March 2024, and that record has now been broken three times since 2012.

Alton Bay is the long southern finger on this board, the first of the five ports the original paddle steamer was launched from in 1872.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: May 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Lake Winnipesaukee map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, inset, with the dam following the waterline about half an inch out.

Winnipesaukee is a shape that fights you. It is barely a lake outline at all, more a spread of bays and channels wrapped around a scatter of islands, and every one of those islands is dammed on all sides. The larger ones are manageable. The small ones come down to specks of walnut a millimetre or two across, ringed completely, and those are the ones we watch through both the flood and the sand back. Then Alton Bay runs off the south end as a long narrow finger where the two dam lines sit close together for its whole length.

Two colours. The water and the black, which does the lettering, the north arrow and the pin marker. The arrow and the pin are syringe fills, both being small shapes with corners rather than curves, and corners are what has to hold.