Jamie Bourassa has been preparing ice for 36 years.
Head icemaker Bourassa and his team of 15 have been hard at work converting the space in Mosaic Place for the Canada Cup of Curling, which is set to begin Wednesday and runs until Sunday.
“I love the challenge and being able to solve different situations all the time,” said Bourassa, who resides in Calgary. “It’s exciting ... It’s a lot of the same people you get to see every year. So I mean you’re revisiting with old friends and that’s nice.”
Bourassa and his team have been hard at work transforming Mosaic Place's regular hockey rink into a curling arena. He said they finished three 18- or 19-hour days of work in order to be ready for practice on Tuesday at noon and the games themselves.
“We’ll come into the hockey arena like this and we build our ice overtop of their ice. So we put a flood of water down and then we let that freeze and we paint it white,” said Bourassa. “From that point we marked all our circles, all our lines and painted all those in and just (kept) building it up from there until we (had) built a curling club inside the hockey arena.”
But completing the transformation isn’t easy and it involves a lot of challenges for all of the workers involved, apart from long days with little sleep.
For more information, see an upcoming edition of the Times-Herald.
