I had just moved into a new house with a pond in the back. Although the pond was beautiful, I was apprehensive about my young children drowning or possibly falling through the ice in the winter. At about the same time, I had developed an addiction to the "911" and rescue video programs on television. The real life footage taught me a lot about how ice rescues are handled. I noticed that rescue crews had many methods and tools for getting something or someone to the victim (throw ropes, ladders, rescue boats, rescue swimmers). But there appeared to be a lack of methods for pulling these same items out of the water once contact was made. The usual scenario involved 3 or 4 people slipping on the ice while pulling on a rope.


As we continued to move into the house, I pondered the ice rescue problem in the back of my mind. Then the revelation came...while hanging pictures! We were putting up what appeared to be the 100th picture, when my wife handed me a particularly heavy frame. I had just purchased a new type of picture hook from the home center with 3 pins. The package said that it could hold 100 lbs. As I hammered those 3 pins in, I realized that the same concept could be scaled up and placed horizontally (on ice) to form an "ice anchor." The addition of a winch would add a mechanical advantage to the equation. And that's how the ice anchor concept was born!


The basic concept for the Ice Anchor is the same as that of the innocent picture hook. Hammer a pin through a plate and into a substrate (ice) at a proper angle, and any force applied to the plate parallel to the substrate will pull the plate against the surface. The harder you pull, the more the plate is forced against the surface. In real life prototype testing, we found that the Ice Anchor was helpful in every situation where people and/or equipment had to be pulled out of the water and onto the ice. The unexpected bonus was that 1 or 2 people could now do the job that used to take 3 or 4 people. The result was less people on the ice, less people needed to affect a rescue and more power and control during the retrieval process. In one situation, a single person (a woman in this case) cranked a heavy rescue boat with 3 people in it onto the ice...even I was impressed.