Terrible Ice Fishing News: FAA Says No Drone Beer Deliveries Out To Lakes

It seemed like a stupendously brilliant idea. The Lakemaid Brewery in Stevens Point, Wisconsin thought it would be a fantastic idea to deliver 12-packs of its beer via drone to people ice fishing on nearby lakes.

A drone delivers beer to ice fishermen on a Wisconsin
lake. The FAA says no more deliveries are allowed.  

They did a test, which is in a video below, and it worked wonderfully.

However, all you ice fishing enthusiasts out on the lakes in the Great White North of this great nation, no drones are going to deliver beer to you, the Federal Aviation Administration has decreed.

If you want some refreshments you have to get off the ice and get it yourself.

Lakemaid Brewery Managing Partner Jack Supple said he was a bit surprised by the FAA's ruling, according to NPR:

"We were a little surprised at the FAA interest in this since we thought we were operating under the 400-foot limit....(we) figured a vast frozen lake was a lot safer that (what) Amazon was showing on 60 Minutes."

Supple was referring to a tentative plan by Amazon to deliver goods via drone that was highlighted on the CBS news show. 

It turns out commercial deliveries via drones are illegal in the United States. The Amazon drone demonstration was done in another country so they didn't break any laws.

Supple said he does understand the FAA's reasoning with it's ruling that ended the ice fishing beer deliveries before they really got off the ground.

"I understand their concern... Drones whizzing around piloted by any knucklehead is probably not the Jetsons future we all imagined."

Here's the beer deliver video. It really is quite cool:

Frigid Funnel Clouds on Lake Champlain, Vermont

Today, we had a blast of Arctic air in Vermont. Temperatures fell through the single numbers toward nighttime lows well below zero

Steam rising from Lake Champlain
tries to form into a funnel
in frigid weather Wednesday

The cold air blew over the, relatively speaking, warm water of Lake Champlain, a lake still unfrozen due to what was a fairly warm winter up until now.

This kind of weather always creates interesting steam clouds, mist, swirls and whirls over the lake. Sometimes you even get waterspouts or steam devils  in this frigid air.

That sort of happened today, when brief funnel clouds spun up over the lake. These aren't dangerous, like spring or summertime tornadoes. First of all, nobody in their right mind would be out on the lake on a bitter day like this.

Cold air funnels or steam devils don't really have strong damaging winds in them, so they'd do little damage aside messing up your hair if they hit you. And cold air funnels almost never come ashore to cause any kind of land-based gusts

What the funnels do well, however, is make one stay on the shore of the lake and marvel at their beauty, even though the icy north wind is turning you into a giant popsicle.

A brief video I took today of the funnel, or funnel attempts, is below:





And here's another, slightly longer video I took, same scene. Camera was shaky due to a long lens, and you sometimes lose sight of the funnels, as it was hard to see what was most interesting while I was running the video camera: