A new era begins at the Slave Lake Curling Club this year. Longtime ice-maker Barry Massell is gone, and replacing him is an untested Ray Gauthier, with help from club president Chris Jones.
“It’ll be interesting,” says Jones. “Neither of us will be as good as Barry, but we’ll see how it goes.”
Jones was actually ready to go it alone this year, having ‘apprenticed’ under Massell last season. But at the first club meeting of the season, he spotted Gauthier and remembered, “Last year he had bugged me about making ice.”
The two have since attended a course.
“We learned from some of the best,” Jones says. “Hopefully we can put it to good use.”
There are challenges. The rink is apparently three inches higher at one end than the other, and overcoming that is not as easy as letting the water fill up the low spots. If you put a lot of water in at once, Jones says, it ends up with a surface nobody would want to curl on. It’s a surprising amount of work.
“You have to build it a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch at a time. We’re going to flood two or three times a day for a week or two.”
Jones predicts start-up for league curling should be sometime between mid and late October. More specific than that he will not get.
Despite jitters about ice-making, Jones is optimistic about the new season.
“We’ve got a full board,” he says. “Great people.”
In other curling news, the mixed league will now go on Monday nights instead of the usual Wednesdays.

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