If so here is an “ice bucket” offered for sale:
Arctic Scout is currently listed with Essex Boat Works in Westbrook, Connecticut, at $124,999.
She does not look like a yacht. She looks like what she is: a 61-year-old working vessel built to military specification, with a fiberglass hull reinforced at the bow for breaking minor ice, a lead-ballasted keel designed to self-right if she rolls, and the general aesthetic of something that has spent its life doing serious work in serious conditions. The current interior is functional. The wheelhouse is compact. There is no teak cockpit, no sunbed, no marble galley counter.
The original Ice Buckets were built of oak, teak, and mahogany; the same materials generations of naval shipwrights had trusted because they understood them, because they bent without shattering, because when you drove a wooden vessel into pack ice at low speed the hull absorbed the impact in ways that early designers of synthetic materials could not yet guarantee. These wooden boats went into Antarctic waters and they did their jobs, and the men who sailed them remember those waters with the particular clarity that comes from having been genuinely cold and genuinely afraid and genuinely alive.
Arctic Scout (ASB 39020) is the fiberglass copy. She was built in 1965 at Bellingham, Washington, and she carries all the structural thinking of her wooden predecessors: the reinforced bow, the reinforced belt around the waterline to resist pressure from ice fields, the collision bulkhead, the watertight lazarette, the watertight deck hatches, the protected propeller, the self-righting keel. She was not designed for comfort. She was designed to survive.
Any takers?
Going Dutch? Here is a Dutch sailing barge that lost it’s way and somehow got to Ålesund:
OK it’s a replica and I’m not sure if it is for sale, but here is one that is:
The Duth barge; FLICKAN MED FETA RUMPAN.
PS: No idea why this one has name in Swedish: (“Girl with a fat arse”)
Average home price where the boat is listed, Westbrook, CT., is $565,000. $125k ain’t that bad if a single person or adventurous young couple wanted to rough it & have a story to tell once they gained some sense.
The average home value in Westbrook, CT is $565,838, up 5.5% over the past year. Learn more about the Westbrook housing market and real estate trends.
Why did you delete your posts? But good idea about ice protection in Texas. 210 Texans died in a freaking ice storm. You need that boat!!
https://tpwmagazine.com/wildlife-conservation/winter-storm-uri/
UGB
June 6, 2026, 11:32pm
8
I love the idea of an ice breaking yacht!
The hull plating at water line on the bow of my tug it doubled up. I think at some point in the last century it may have been used to break ice once or twice.
