'It's turned into an outdoor swimming pool': Warm weather wrecking rinks
If you were hoping to go for an outdoor skate to enjoy the warm weather, you might have to move indoors.
A number of outdoor rinks across the city have temporarily closed up shop as warm temperatures continue.
"We have two inches of water on top of the ice. It's turning to slush so we're trying to keep people off it so we don't wreck the rink when it gets cold out and we don't have to start from scratch," says Tracey Ball, president of Sinclair Park Community Centre.
Sinclair Park's outdoor rink has been closed since Monday. It costs thousands of dollars a year to flood the rink and she worries they won't have enough money left to get the rink up and running before the winter comes to an end.
"We will have to do some fundraising, hold an extra social," says Ball. "It's hard. But we will try to rebuild it and get it open again because we have too many people who use it. Hockey teams that practice on it."
Ball says practices on the outdoor rink have been cancelled and several games have been postponed. However her club has offered dry ice training inside of the facility in the meantime.
"This has been a difficult year. At times it was too cold to even flood. It was freezing while it was coming out of the hose," says Ball. "If I could suck all this water up and save it in a barrel, that would be great. But that's not going to happen."
Jim Proulx is the general manager for Assiniboia West Recreation Association. The club maintains four outdoor rinks, two on Morgan Crescent and two at their Buchanan Boulevard location.
He says the warm weather has definitely wreaked havoc.
"Starting Friday with the drizzle and rain, the rinks have be closed and are getting very soft and melting slowly," says Proulx.
The club manager is hoping temperatures drop below –5 C tonight.
"It will help us out a lot. The forecasts speaks of cooler temperatures so we will be able to begin repairs quickly," says Proulx. "I hope."
Marcy Beaucage, "the ice man" at Roblin Park Community Centre, says in his 29 years he hasn't seen anything like this before — rain during the centre's annual winter carnival.
"We played hockey on Friday night though," he said. "The kids were having a blast, skating around though the water, water was flying around while they [shot] ... They didn't care."
The warm weather hasn't only closed rinks: the Red River Mutual Trail and all skating at the Forks has also been shut down until further notice.
The Red River Trail runs on the Assiniboine River from a port at The Forks to Osborne Village as well as part of the Red River toward the Norwood Bridge.