Game on, mate!

After moving to St. Albert from his warm Australia home, Bradley Watts thought he’d take advantage of the Canadian winter.

But the temporary foreign worker didn’t expect to end up chasing a puck on a frozen river.

Watts is working with PCL Construction on the new Target store in St. Albert.

Originally, his co-worker Tom Hughes planned to take Watts to an NHL hockey game. But with that league still inactive due to a labour dispute, Hughes decided to teach his friend the rules in a different way.

So they built a rink on the Sturgeon River, which lies just a stone’s throw from their job site.

“There is no hockey so we thought let’s play instead of sitting around our Xboxes at home,” Hughes said.

“It’s a wicked pastime for us, and we are out here every Friday after work.”

On Fridays, a team of PCL and other construction workers meet to play a tournament. But Hughes admits they practice the game on most other days. Both he and Watts are pretty useless at hockey, he laughs.

“We checked the ice before we built it and there’s six inches, so it’s definitely safe. And we all dedicated to take it down in the spring,” he said.

The rink is a small stretch of cleared ice on the river that the workers have flooded and surrounded with wooden boards. There’s a single goal on the site and even a loonie buried at centre.

The games begin in classic pickup hockey fashion, with players throwing their sticks in the middle of the rink to be sorted randomly into two piles to form the teams.

Watts came to Canada three months ago and said he intends to stay for a couple of years. He said he’s skated before but hockey is not common in Australia.

“I am definitely getting better, figuring it out pretty quick,” he said.

“This is hands down the most Canadian thing I’ve done since I’ve been here,” he said. “The guys are not going easy on me but that makes me get better.”