Into a ditch

One day, I finished setting up my hockey rink outside of my house for the upcoming winter (it was Christmas Eve which for a hockey rink is late) . The final step was to ensure that the liner in the hockey rink in my front yard was securely in place before adding the water, and that’s exactly what we did at 11 pm. This day I had just finished setting up my hockey rink outside for the winter ahead, the last step was to make sure that the liner in the hockey rink was nice and secure before we could put in the water. So we went outside and thought we did just that, so what we did was put the hose into the hockey rink in my yard and started the water from my house well.

After a short while, all was going well so we left the water on all night so that we could let the water fill up the huge hockey rink that we had. Until we woke up that next day at 8 am to see half of the hockey rinks gravel and water from the rink gone washed into the ditch near the road. This was all because the liner got to tight because we left the water in the rink way to long so it overflowed onto one side, and boom the rink was no longer skateable. After all of those long countless hours of putting the boards into the rink and making sure it was level, it was all just gone in one night. Once my mom found out about all of this ( she was in Florida with her mom) she almost kicked us out, she knew how much it had cost us to make this hockey rink, and seeing it in her ditch in her yard was not a good sign. After she got her screams out my father and I had to do lots of chores and clean up are Ditch so that it could run cleanly again.

In conclusion, the next time there’s a time for my hockey rink I will always be on standby of the water to make sure that it will not overflow and end up in my ditch. This mistake that my father and I had was a costly mistake cost almost $4,000 with half of the rink gone and all of the water also the manual labor that we had put into this, so this taught me to always check on things to make sure that nothing costly will happen when you put so much time and effort into it. The thing that I will learn most about the mistake that I made wasn’t just the money but the time I had so the next time I think of doing something like this I will 1000% check everything way more than once. Lastly, we still have not had our full rink back as I have been very busy as I’ve been getting older but if I can just do a smaller half-size hockey rink this year I think we should, my hockey rink had been flooded even worse a couple of years later not in the winter time from are mistakes but from the bad weather so we think that it’s best if we don’t fix the rink to save money and do what we can with what we have now.

Featured image: “Ditch Witch” by Mozul is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.