I'm standing on my dock on Bala Bay and I can't tell you what day it is.

Not the date. I know the date. I mean ice out. The ice broke yesterday. Or it broke today. Or it's breaking right now. Sheets of it are drifting past the dock and piling up against the falls. Some of the pieces are the size of a football field. Some are the size of a truck. Some are the size of a dinner plate. They float by at their own pace, bumping into each other, spinning, breaking into smaller pieces that break into smaller pieces. The bay is half open, half not. You could put a boat in. You'd spend most of the trip dodging icebergs, but technically, you could do it.

So when's the official ice out? Yesterday? Today? Thursday, when the last piece finally washes through?

It depends on who you ask.

The Ice going out in Bala Bay, April 14, 2026.

Some people call it when you can run a boat shore to shore without hitting anything. Some call it when there's no visible white from the dock. Some wait until the last shelf lets go of the north side of the lake, where the shade holds on longest. And some people just pick the day it feels done to them personally, and that's the end of the conversation.

There is no official definition. There never has been. 

I have a group of friends who get together every spring for a lakeside maple syrup boil. Families who've tapped trees bring their sap over, someone gets the fire going, and they spend the afternoon standing around outside — drinking, talking, staring at the lake. The lake is right there behind them. Still frozen.

At some point, somebody starts a pool. Everyone throws in a date and a few bucks. Ice out. Closest guess takes it.

What follows is completely predictable. Someone brings up this year's cold snap at the end of January. Someone else has a theory about water temperature that they're presenting as fact. A third person is absolutely certain it went out on April 9th in 2012 because they were putting the dock in that morning and they remember because... 

Everyone has a take. The takes are the whole point.

It's been like this for a long time. Longer than any of us.

Ice out records for Lake Rosseau. 1886–1996. Port Sandfield.

The first ice out date on record for Lake Rosseau is 1886. April 23rd. Someone at Muskoka Lakes Marine in Port Sandfield started keeping a poster on the wall. One date per year, written in, every spring. It got passed from one family to the next for over a century. The Henry family started it. Captain Rogers kept it going. The Croucher's took over. Cecil Fraser watched for sixty years.

My dad grew up in Port Sandfield. My grandparents ran the store in town. That poster was handed down to him from them. 

The earliest Rosseau ever went out was March 27th, 1946. The latest was May 7th, 1926. Forty-one days apart. A hundred and ten years of data and the window is still six weeks wide. The average is around April 19th or 20th. The lake has never once cared about the average.

And then there's Pearl Davidson.

Pearl lived on Bala Bay. Right here. Looking out at the Kee to Bala. Starting in 1977, she wrote down the ice out date every spring on a single sheet of lined paper. One line per year. She kept going until 2013. Thirty-six years.

The handwriting changes over the decades. The ink shifts colour. There's a question mark beside 1984. And in the year 2000, she didn't just write the date. She wrote "Mar. 25, 4:00pm."

She noted the time.

Pearl Davidson's ice out record. Bala Bay, Lake Muskoka. 1977–2013.

Her earliest: March 25th, 2000. Her latest: April 27th, 1978. Thirty-three days apart across thirty-six years of watching the same bay from the same window.

The view of the Kee to Bala from Pearl's house. Photo from Steve Davidson circa 1972.

I don't know what Pearl's definition was. Whether she called it when the bay cracked open or when the last piece drifted past her window. But she picked a day. Every year. And she wrote it down.

People have been writing this down for 140 years. Pearl did it for 36 of them from one window on one bay.

The thing about ice out is that it's different on every lake. Rosseau doesn't go out the same week as Muskoka. Lake of Bays runs its own schedule. Your bay isn't the same as the bay around the point. It never is.

If you're on Bala Bay, you can always count Jack Fredrickson to be the first boat on the bay. This shot is from April 2015

Right now, as I write this, it's raining. It's been raining for two days. Across Muskoka, on lakes and bays and channels, the ice is doing what it does every April. On some lakes it happened yesterday. On others it'll be this week. A few won't go until the end of the month.

Which brings me to this.

The Ice Out Log

We're building the 2026 record. Not for one lake. For as many as we can.

Tell us your lake. Tell us the date. We'll log it and publish the results, every lake, every date, side by side. The full picture, built by the people who actually watched it happen.

We're doing it for as many Muskoka lakes as we can. One year at a time.

Everyone who submits gets a discount code as a thank you — it'll be waiting for you on the other side.

And if you've been keeping your own record, send it our way. The more history we can gather, the better the record gets.

It's happening right now. On my bay. On yours. On the one you drive past every morning.

Log yours.