The winner of this year's Joe's Pond Ice Out Contest has officially been named.The Joe's Pond Association announced on Thursday that Stuart Ramsdell from Danville had the closest guess out of everyone that entered this year's contest.The official ice-out time was 4:02 AM, Sunday April 14 – announced on the Joe's Pond Association (JPA) website.Ramsdell guessed that the ice-out would occur at 4:09 a.m. on April 14. The JPA said that this was the closest guess from about 350 guesses for that date.More than 15,000 tickets were sold for this year's contest. Ramsdell will take home a check for a cool $6,974 thanks to his winning guess.Ice-out dates have been tracked on Joe's Pond since 1988 by the JPA. The earliest on record was April 5, 2010. The latest ice-out on record was May 6, 1992.The JPA runs an annual contest where participants are invited to guess the ice-out date for a small fee. Whoever guesses closest to the actual date is deemed the winner, and gets half the total ticket proceeds, with the other half going to the association. The winner of this year's contest has yet to be announced.Many consider this event to be an unofficial mark of spring's beginning in Vermont.