When I lived in the USA, on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, we restored and “sailed” an ICEBOAT. It was a blast! Speeds in excess of 60 Knots could easily be had from a breeze of less than 20 Knots. Don`t ask me about the physics: it just seemed to go faster and faster until running out of frozen lake. Then it could be stopped on a dime with gut-wrenching “G” forces. We had to wear leather face-masks to stop the flesh being flayed from our faces. Hell, (as they say), we sure had fun!

Found this hard as I didn’t dare write in Store, Situation, Outstrip and Coquette as although I got them early, I thought I was missing the cryptic element and they were too obvious. I only put them in out of desperation in the end.

I did like 5d (nightspot) though for the surface (took me back to my clubbing days!) and once I’d got over the barely-cryptic definitions and entered them into the grid it was a swift solve. Nice for a Monday

Thank you Eileen for reassuring me that I wasn’t missing anything. And thankyou Rufus for the puzzle itself.

I checked this this morning, as I, too, would have expected ‘icebreaker’ – but I know Rufus knows his boats!. Chambers has: ‘a boat for forcing a way through ice, an ice-breaker; a craft mounted on runners for moving over ice’.

Pleasant start to the week. I found this pretty easy, although the NW corner took me a little longer – I took a while to get a purchase on its cluster of cd/dd clues.

As others have said, the ‘grand’ in both clue and answer to 13d was a pity, and I felt the ‘post’ and ‘office’ in 1a were synonyms in the sense required by the answer – although this clue can’t be faulted for its concision!

11a I liked a lot, although it is surprisingly libertarian for Rufus: the clue works as a fun cd, but to OUTSTRIP would be to beat the opposition in getting bare – not quite the same as ‘barely beat’ them.

The last time I remember the -or/-ress debate here was when Araucaria had the lovely word ‘psaltress’ in a puzzle. The Guardian house style is now to use ‘actor’ for both sexes, although this is one case where the distinction seems to me to be justified, irrespective of award categories – men are usually cast in male roles and women in female ones, so unlike ‘doctors’, for example, there is a clear division of labour. But we still have ‘princess’ ‘duchess’ etc. King Elizabeth II, anyone?

…But yes, actually commenting this time over ICEBOAT…

I looked it up online and Google seems very certain that ICEBOAT refers to a land-skating type of boat as opposed to an ICEBREAKER (which clears the route for other ships). If these terms aren’t synonymous doesn’t it fail to fit the clue? I’ve probably missed an older meaning somewhere!