The Navesink River only freezes every so often, which is a shame, given that one of the world’s only dedicated iceboating clubhouses still sits on its southern shore, at Red Bank, New Jersey, an ongoing museum to a formerly aristocratic pastime that propelled humans at speeds not yet known to be worthy of an interstate. “Whether it’s climate change or what, I don’t know,” Jack Mulvihill, an avid iceman, said recently. “We haven’t had cold winters.” This winter, of course, has been an exception—a throwback. Mulvihill was sitting on the second floor of the clubhouse, next to a gas-fired stove, while, out on the brackish slab, the wind chill was minus seven, and a long-awaited race for perhaps the oldest North American sports trophy was on the cusp of being postponed, yet again, on account of gale-force gusts.
Mulvihill was the keeper of the trophy: the Van Nostrand Challenge Cup, a silver chalice with wintry sailing scenes in bas-relief. His club, the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat and Yacht Club, won it in 1891, in a race on Orange Lake, in Newburgh, New York, where the cup was commissioned by a local businessman, Gardiner Van Nostrand. (Hockey’s Stanley Cup, often said to be the continent’s oldest trophy, wasn’t commissioned until 1892.) Then—well, “it’s a very fickle sport,” as an ex-commodore from the rival Hudson River Ice Yacht Club put it. The temperature, the wind, the rules, human memory: all fickle. Iceboating, a common fixation of turn-of-the-century sportswriters, fell out of favor for several decades, and the Van Nostrand lost its lustre. North Shrewsbury club members passed it around among themselves. “They just called it the Commodore Trophy,” Mulvihill said. “Nobody knew what the hell it was. They took it up to Tiffany’s one day in the nineteen-seventies when there was no ice, and they had it appraised. We almost fell off our chairs.” A jeweller had apparently estimated its worth at nearly twenty thousand dollars. The sportswriters returned.
The first—and only—Van Nostrand race of the twentieth century took place in 1978, and it was contentious. “There was blood flowing down these stairs,” Mulvihill said, facetiously. The winning skipper was a retired Marine Corps pilot named Reuben Snodgrass, from Ronkonkoma. But the Shrewsbury club set the rules and awarded itself first place, on team-score grounds. “He made his own cup, he was so mad,” Mulvihill said of Snodgrass. The Snodgrass version of the Van Nostrand was on display on a nearby table, unpolished. A New Yorker had brought it down as a playful provocation. The real trophy, meanwhile, had resided in a safe that had once belonged to Mulvihill’s grandfather, a Depression-era banker. “Nobody can get in there unless they put a gun to my head,” Mulvihill said.
Warmer winters helped alleviate some of the tension, as the New Jersey sailors, seeking more reliable ice, accepted invitations from their old adversaries up in Newburgh and on the Hudson, north of Poughkeepsie. Another race for the Van Nostrand was convened on the Navesink in 2003. The locals won again. “We’re used to hard ice,” Dan Lawrence, a third-generation iceboater from Orange Lake, the cup’s original home, explained. “This is what we call sherbert.” The salt softens the surface. Iceboats run on blades, like giant skates, which are sometimes sharpened with belt sanders. Lawrence said that he had broadened his blades’ angles this year, in anticipation of a rematch: a hundred and five degrees, instead of ninety.
The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called “A” boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years.
“In twenty years, we can do it again!” a New Yorker joked.
“Well, we were thinking after lunch,” a New Jerseyan countered.
“You know what? It takes a lot off my mind,” Jack Mulvihill said, as he contemplated relinquishing his charge. “They’ll take good care of it.”
But first they had to fill it with champagne.
