wbuffetjr I think you may be right about not having enough hours of wind at any one time for your circulating pond water to cut a hole up thru the ice. mnfish may be on to something that you could incorporate next season. Even better for you with all your snow cover might be to drive some vertical pipe, posts, or the like, into the pond bottom near your diffuser. The vertical pipe would absorb heat from the sun and tend to have thinner ice right by it.
Your circulating pond water would have to do less work to break thru the ice when the wind did return. Just a thought.
