Playing a casual round in the deep snow? Try this.

[Ken Niu]

Hey, great new message board! I just wanted to share a handy tip I picked up somewhere on the PDGA message board. Take an old cassette tape and pull out about 6 feet of it. Cut it off and tape it securely (clear packing tape works well) to the center of your favorite driver (I chose the top, you could try the bottom). The cassette tape is really strong, easy to spot in deep snow and doesn't affect the flight of the disc that much (about 10% less D and flies as if its 10gr heavier.)

[Jeff LaGrassa]

The "ribbon trick" has been discussed already this winter, but it will be good to have this info available on the new board.

Here's an old article from Disclife.com about it: Breakthroughs in Winter Golf -Combating Old Man Freeze

For those of us who live in cold climates (Michigan here), Old Man Winter presents a challenge. The average day of frisbee golf has a wind chill factor below freezing and an accumulation of snow and/or ice to trudge through and throw off of. Those are the average days. The nasty weather days are much worse. So some players hibernate and bring their discs out again in April. Others refuse to let the weather stop their game.

Over the years I have noticed that the players who play year round are the ones who improve the most. The worse the weather, the more valuable the training experience by playing in it. For example, the only way to learn to play in big wind is to go out when it is really windy. You cannot go out in calm conditions and just imagine it is windy. The same holds true for ice storms and snow squalls. Unless you have practiced in it, you are just guessing.

This Winter I have found two breakthroughs for dealing with the elements: The first combats snow, the second combats ice.

The first is attaching a ribbon to a disc so that it can be found in the snow. I was shocked how well this worked. My friend Bruce Brakel came out to our Sunday league right after a storm with a fresh 10 inches of snow on the ground. Bruce said he read about it on the Internet and had duct-taped a 3-4 foot length of thin "curling" ribbon to the bottom of a disc.

The ribbon makes it darn near impossible to lose a disc in the snow. It doesn't seem to affect the flight much at all. The ribbon flutters in flight so it probably takes a tiny bit off the distance of the drive (Editor's note: it is important that you center the ribbon in the middle of the disc for best flight performance. Make a small hole in the center of a two inch x two inch piece of duct tape and insert the tip of your ribbon into it, then affix to the bottom of the disc, centering it as best as possible.).

The ribbon takes care of the two most common problems in the snow: the shanked drive and the good drive which lands in the walking path.

The shank is so far off the beaten trail that it is hard to estimate its location. If you are not within a few feet of the disc you may not see that entry mark in the snow. The bright ribbon shows up easily. It saves so much time looking for discs.

Sometimes a good drive is lost in the snow. The drive flies to the center of the fairway but happens to land in the walking path and skips under undisturbed snow. You shuffle your feet in the area and hope to turn it up. For all of us who have lost discs on good drives, the ribbon technique saves time and plastic.

It has really caught on in Michigan. We have used it in tournaments without problem, except of course for J-Bird.

J-Bird is a friend of the column and frisbee legend. If you own a tie-dyed disc, it was probably tie-dyed by J-Bird. J-Bird Discs and all that. So J-Bird was in my group at a recent Ice Bowl in Lansing. Hey, it was the first round so there is no shame in that. We came up to the next-to-last hole of the first round. J-Bird had had no breaks the whole round. Every tree bounce went the wrong way. Even the Mach 3's were unfriendly. Which is rare. Some days J-Bird is a putting God. Just ask him.

#16 was a 250' hyzer with a low ceiling. It normally was an easy skip shot to the basket but with deep snow there was no skip to be had. J-Bird decided to try the over-the-top anhyzer route. This was semi crazy. To hit the anhyzer route you have to throw it a mile up over the trees then have it flip at just the right angle and dodge through a maze of branches to get to the basket. J-Bird cranked a huge anhyzer. It got over the top! It turned hard and started gliding straight at the basket. Suddenly the disc jerked in mid-flight then hung and dangled. Yep. The ribbon got caught on a branch and the disc was swaying like a hanged criminal, 35 feet off the ground.

Thereafter, just to encourage players to use ribbons, we have authored the J-Bird rule. There is no 2 meter rule penalty if your disc is hanging OB solely by the ribbon. But, of course, we stroked J-Bird.

[Shawn Kennedy]

Cool idea--but just wondering if this would be legal in a tourney? According to the rulebook, "Players may not make post-production modification of discs which alter their original flight characteristics."
Even add-ons that have some thickness, such as paint or tape, are not allowed for ID purposes--only marker.
What do you all think?