Entry 03 · Winter

Cutting an ice hole that is still open on Sunday morning

Cutting the hole takes forty minutes with two people and a hand saw. Keeping it open and getting people back out of it is the rest of the winter, and that is the part that took us three seasons to arrange properly.

1.4°C at knee depth

Dip only

At the water: 19 January 2025
Typed up: 10 February 2025
Reading: 8 minutes
Where: Zarasai, Utena County

Where the hole goes

No frozen lake freezes evenly, and the differences are invisible once snow is lying on it. Springs keep patches thin all winter. Inflows and outflows do the same, and ice over a submerged channel can be half the thickness of ice two metres to either side. We cut in the same bay every year, roughly thirty metres out from a gently shelving shore, over water about two and a half metres deep, and three test holes get drilled along the route before the saw comes out of the bag.

Depth matters for a reason that is not immediately obvious. Somewhere you can stand is somewhere a person in trouble can put their feet down, and a bay shallow enough to stand in for the first ten metres means the route from the hole back to the bank is walkable if it ever has to be. We stay out of reed beds entirely. The ice there is thinner, it is full of gas, and the bottom is soft in a way that helps nobody who is trying to find their footing.

Said out loud on the bank

Drill test holes and measure; never estimate from the surface
Stay clear of springs, inflows, outflows and reed beds
Choose water shallow enough to stand up in near the bank
Cut in the same known place each winter rather than a fresh one

The cut itself

We cut a rectangle roughly two metres by one, which is large enough for two swimmers and small enough to keep. A hand ice saw does the work; a chainsaw is quicker and we stopped using one after a morning of oil sitting on the surface. The technique that took longest to learn was what to do with the slab. Cut it into three pieces, push each one under the far edge rather than heaving it out, and it disappears instead of leaving a pile of blocks that freezes back into a ridge.

The edge nearest the shore gets shaped with a chisel into two rough steps, which the lake obligingly rebuilds every night into something smoother than we left it. A wooden ladder sits in the hole on that side, screwed to a plank lying flat on the ice. The ladder is not there for climbing down. It is there because a wet hand can hold a rung and cannot hold a wet ice edge, and every exit that has given us trouble involved somebody trying to push up off a lip.

Keeping it open

An open hole at minus ten skins over within the hour and is twenty centimetres thick by morning, and re-cutting a refrozen hole every visit is how groups quietly stop swimming in February. Two sheets of thick foam insulation cut to fit, laid on and shovelled over with snow, will keep a hole workable overnight down to about minus fifteen. Below that we accept a skin of ice in the morning and break it out with the chisel, which is five minutes of work rather than forty.

The lid is also the safety measure that matters most, because an open hole is a hazard to everyone else on the lake and not only to us. Ours is marked at each corner with a bamboo cane and a strip of orange tape, and the canes go back in before we leave even on mornings when nobody else has been out at all. Skiers cross that bay at dusk. A covered, marked hole is a nuisance to them; an open unmarked one under fresh snow is something else.

Getting out is the part you plan first

Cold water takes your hands before it takes anything else. Within ninety seconds at one degree your grip is measurably worse, and within three minutes most people cannot work a zip. Every part of our exit is built for hands that will not close: a ladder with wide rungs, a rope knotted every thirty centimetres running from the ladder to a stake driven into the bank, and one person standing on the ice in boots whose entire job for that swim is to be within reach of the hole.

The order gets set before anybody undresses. Two in, two out, the counter on the ice with the times written on the back of a hand in marker, because paper gets wet and phones stop working in that cold. Nobody stays in past the agreed time even if they feel fine, and feeling fine is not evidence of anything at all: the last person we called out early was talking cheerfully about extending her swim and could not undo the toggle on her own bag ninety seconds later.

Said out loud on the bank

A ladder fixed to a plank, never an exit off a bare ice lip
Knotted rope from the exit to a stake on the bank
One person on the ice in boots, doing nothing else
Agreed times written in marker; phones do not work out there