After Decades

Breaking Otsego Lake

Ice, HEAT!

Watch For ‘Bubba,’ ‘Darling Tug,’ This Spring

By JIM KEVLIN

COOPERSTOWN - You may have noticed a tug boat, “Bubba,” parked in the snow between the Lakefront Hotel & Restaurant and the lighthouse. There’s a story behind it.

Last April, as her family – beginning with grandfather Alfred Engelmann – has done for 63 years, Lakefront proprietor Paula Wikoff headed out in a 30-foot steel cutter – let’s call it “Blue” – to chop up Otsego Lake’s ice pack before it could break up and damage docks along Cooperstown’s lakeshore. The ice floe “can be a mile wide. It can be two miles, coming at us,” she explained. Usually, a warm Southwind is  ‘blowing by then, pushing the ice away from the shore. Last year was another story, she recalled with a shiver, “there was a Northwest wind, 30 miles per hour, that never stopped.”