Skating on the Okanagan

It's not every day – or even every year – that you get to skate on Okanagan Lake, but on Sunday in Penticton, people were doing just that.

With last week's deep freeze that hit the area, the water close to the shores of Penticton froze over, and people were skating out several hundred metres away from the beach.

"It takes me back to my childhood in the West Kootenays, actually, we had a creek and a pond behind our house," said George Clarke, who was out skating on the lake Sunday afternoon. 

"We were always out shovelling and stuff like that. Of course, it's really nice conditions like this, where you don't actually have to do any shovelling, you can just get out there and skate."

For most on the lake on Sunday, it was their first time in years skating on the Okanagan, and in some cases, it was their first time ever.

"I grew up in Sicamous, we did it a little bit, it's a bit colder up there, but I've never seen the lake freeze since I've lived down here," said Chad Kupczyk, who said he's lived in the area since the early 1990s.

By all accounts, the ice was as smooth as can be expected from the lake.

Some consider the Sunday skate to be their reward for bearing through temperatures that dipped down to -15 C last week.

"Who knows when you're going to do it again," Kupczyk said. "Hopefully not for a while, it's been a little colder than normal, but this makes up for it, it's pretty fun."

For others, it's a chance to get some practice in skating.

"This is the first time I've actually skated," said Sasha Melo, who said she fell a number of times on Sunday. "It didn't really hurt."

With temperatures expected to rise in the coming days, Sunday may have been the last chance for skating on the lake for some time to come.