Dale, I can't imagine even getting my big toe wet at 35 below, say nothing of choosing to swim through the ice in February. We used to cut a whole in the lake ice for our local polar bear club so they could go for a swim on New Years Morning. The temperature was usually somewhere between 10 and 20 above and no matter how good the New Years Eve celebration might have been, I always considered that to be a pretty drastic cure for a hang over.
The maximum thickness of ice that we could cut with our equipment was about 18 Inches. We preferred to handle ice about 8 or 10 inches thick. On the rare occasions that ice on the lakes got thicker than we could handle, we would let the water in previously cut areas refreeze until the ice reached the desired thickness, and then re cut the same area. Early in the season when the ice got to be about 4 inches thick we would cut large blocks and slide them under adjacent un cut sections of ice and let the two layers freeze together. The next morning we could cut 8 inch ice. That was only the first of the many steps required to get ice cubes for our summer time lemonade back in the 40s. Paul Franklin
