Whenever skaters head out on the ice in the Toronto Harbour, people in the condo towers lining the waterfront freak out.

The Toronto Police Marine Unit gets “calls galore” says Sgt. Gerry Klunder and they’re obliged to send out officers to make sure the skaters are safe.

“It’s not illegal,” Klunder said. “But no ice is safe ice.”

“The ice is always shifting around in the harbour,” he said. “So it’s not safe from the point of view that there could be cracks that open up.”

The police push off in their amphibious air boat, which has a big fan on the back and can climb up onto the ice, to inform the skaters of the risks.

“We generally will go out and talk to people and use it as more of an education type thing,” Klunder said.

The skaters fear the police boat and avoid it at all costs. They report being told to get off the ice or asked to wear life jackets. Some claim to have been threatened with tickets. The cat-and-mouse game plays out every winter, with skaters turning tail every time the thundering boat starts up its motor.

Yet each season, Klunder reports, at least one person goes through the ice and needs to be rescued.

Toronto has a long history of skating on the harbour that includes ice-boat races and New Year’s Eve balls on the ice. Those traditions live on in a much reduced form, primarily preserved by a small community of people who live on the Toronto Island.

Each winter they watch the weather and check the ice. They start tentatively in the lagoons between the Islands, and if it gets cold enough, they’ll venture onto the harbour, which can freeze into more than three square kilometres of skating bliss.

Alix McLaughlin is a third-generation islander who cherishes her childhood memories of skating on the harbour and heating her feet up in the oven afterward. In the 1970s, her father, who was a Canadian Olympic sailor, would take the family out for ice-boat regattas on Toronto and Hamilton harbours every winter.

These days, only two ice boats remain and one of them is owned by her brother Terry, who won an Olympic medal sailing for Canada. Last Saturday, Terry had the boat out and was whipping around the harbour as skaters danced around him. The smooth ice was so transparent that you could see the bottom.

“Islanders who skate grew up understanding the ice: the different qualities, conditions and factors you have to look out for,” McLaughlin said.

The conditions were so nice, McLaughlin decided to bring out a piece of island history. In 1935, her 16-year-old father made a skate sail from wood, bamboo and a large triangle of canvas with a mica window, and the family has preserved it.

On the black ice, her husband, Robert Harris, unrolled the 80-year-old sail, donned a powder-blue helmet and demonstrated the technique: holding the sail upwind of him and leaning into it as he gained speed. (Standing with this relic, he could have been mistaken for the man with a similar sail in a photo from 1929 from the Toronto Archives.)

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Nowadays, skaters carry hockey sticks, but it’s not for fun. They’re an essential piece of safety equipment to stop you from going all the way through the ice, says islander and skating enthusiast Joey Gladding. Most skaters also carry special ice picks around their neck to help pull themselves out should they punch through.

“The riskiest thing is city people coming out without anyone from the island,” she said. “They’ve got no safety gear; no knowledge of where the ice is thinnest. Although, there are islanders who push the envelope, too.”

Gladding should know. Twenty-five years ago, she was skating with her friend, Michael Jones, around dusk and didn’t notice that a ship had cut a channel through the ice that had refrozen only paper thin.

Jones went through the ice, and when Gladding went down on all fours to try to rescue him, she went through as well.

“You think you’ll be able to get out easily, but the depletion of energy is so fast,” she said. “I reached out with my stick, remembered my first aid and kicked like hell.”

She was able to get out on her own, but Jones, who was farther out, couldn’t make it back. Luckily, another islander, Brad Harley, was out for a solo skate that evening and pulled Jones from the frigid waters. The story has become part of island lore. Its lesson — “never skate alone on virgin ice” — has been passed on to the new generation, Gladding said.

Word of Toronto Island skating has started spreading the past few winters, and more and more people are heading out from the city to enjoy the wonders of skating on natural ice.

Eugene Kim was all smiles as he boarded the ferry at dusk on Saturday after his first afternoon of skating at the island.

“It was incredible,” he said.

Invited out by a friend who was familiar with the ice, Kim arrived with a group of city dwellers, rented skates at Harbourfront and took the ferry to Ward’s Island. They spent the day on the safe ice of the lagoons, playing a makeshift hockey game with pieces of wood they found on shore.

Lesley Herstein accompanied them, even though she had never skated before.

“After I got over not falling, it was amazing,” she said. “It’s so liberating to embrace winter in this lovely way.”