Ice skating safety and self rescue

For more information on natural-ice skating in general, see Ice skating on natural ice in Sweden.

If you take up the hobby of ice skating on natural ice (lakes, rivers, or the sea), most likely one day either you or someone near you will accidentally end up in the freezing water underneath. This may be because there is a hole in the ice, the ice is thin, or the ice is rotten. The likelihood of such a thing happening depends a lot on your behaviour on the ice, and how dramatic the event becomes depends a lot on how much you have thought about and prepared for the eventuality. Avoiding a winter swim involves learning to read the ice conditions by skating a lot with experienced skaters, reading books, and paying attention whilst skating. Reducing the drama of any accidents that still happen involves skating in company, having bouyancy (such as sealed bags in a backpack), wearing ice prods, carrying a rescue line, carrying dry clothes, reading and thinking about what to do during a rescue from the points of view of both victim and rescuer, and ideally practicing rescues under controlled conditions. I thoroughly recommend practicing (under well-controlled conditions), and I can promise that it is much less unpleasant than it sounds, and that skating on thin ice is a lot less scary afterwards. Further down you'll see some pictures of me practicing. But first :

A real-life rescue story

We were on our way home after a perfect afternoon trip from Uppsala to Wik, and had just passed the fault that usually forms outside the turn-off to Hammarskog (and which happens to be the location where the pictures below were taken), when we watched an old man skate straight into the open water, which apparently he didn't even see. My first reaction was that this was just another little mistake that would be over in seconds as the guy turns around and pulls himself out with his ice prods. But instead he tried to get up on the opposite side, where the ice was weaker and kept breaking away, and he ended up with his arms under the ice where he couldn't do very much anyway, and it quickly became clear that he probably wasn't going to be able to get out by himself. It was lucky we were passing as there were no other skaters in sight. I called to him to turn around and swim back to our side, and then saw that he had no ice prods (it turns out they were in his pocket, but with big mittens on, it was unlikely that he would have been able to get them out), and I threw him a rescue line. I'd practiced this many times before, but always with the idea of rescuing someone far away over thin ice, so it was a surprise when I threw him the packet from 4 meters away and I had to then pull back 20m of extra line before getting any tension. There's no way around this, since it's very hard for the victim to hold the middle of the line, but it was frustrating to waste even 10 or 20 seconds while the guy was bobbing about in the freezing water. It then took two of us to pull him up, since he used both hands to hold the end of the line. He was wearing a life jacket, which helped him float high enough that we even had a chance to do that.
He later told us that he was 87 years old, lived close by, and was looking for his wife, whom he thought he had seen further out, but who turned out to be a navigation bouy. He didn't seem particularly bothered by the swim, and was as alert as anyone his age, but still I was worried about his heart, and tried to pursude him to let us follow him home or at least take some dry clothes, but he insisted he was fine, and would head straight back. Eventually we left him, but when we looked back 5 minutes later, we could see a little speck moving off away from the shore again. I guess he didn't believe us that we could see no-one else on the ice, and was still looking for his wife.

These pictures were taken while I was practicing self-rescue techiniques.
Unfortunately the photographer missed the important steps of getting up on to the ice using the ice prods.