When the temperature drops and the water freezes, two entrepreneurial teenage sisters are putting on their business hats and hiring out skates at St Arnaud’s natural skating pond.
Kaitlyn and Emma Robinson, aged 16 and 13, bought the skate-hire business at the start of winter – which amounted to 70 pairs of skates and as luck would have it, they have had the temperatures drop enough to freeze the pond and entice skaters.
As if a skate-hire business was not enough for these teenagers, they also spend every weekend through the ski season working at Rainbow Ski Area – Kaitlyn as a ski instructor and Emma in rentals. But wait, it doesn’t stop there. The industrious Nelson pair also spend their evenings after school or holiday jobs in the workshop where they run a tune, wax and edge service for skiers and snowboarders.
The frozen pond is the big excitement this year though, not just because it’s their first year with the skate-hire business, but because it’s just the luck of the draw whether it freezes over each year, or not.
“We were really lucky the pond froze the first week of the holidays,” Kaitlyn says.
“We’ve pretty much been sold out every hour, every day. People are coming from all over and getting skates. Sometimes we’ve had to turn people away and tell them to come back in an hour. It’s a sizeable pond so you can have a really good skate around and you have the mountains in the background and forest. That’s why people like it, because it is so natural.”
Kaitlyn says neither sister could run their business operations without the other and “we just get on really well and have a good laugh”.
“We come home from school and crack down to skis – it keeps us out of trouble!”
The sisters operate the skate hire business from the garage of the family bach at St Arnaud and, being the ski season, they spend a lot of time there. The pair’s mother, Rachel Robinson, says the girls purchased the 70 pairs of skates for the skate-hire business using money they earnt last year with their ski workshop.
“They work together and spend hours in the garage at night with their music going and people coming and going with skis.
“They’ve spent hours cleaning up the old skates and to their huge advantage, the pond froze.”
The pond sits on Department of Conservation land and Rachel says it’s there for everybody to enjoy. The sisters simply supply the skates to those who need them, and the family has run a scraper over the ice to improve skating. She says there’s no danger of falling through the ice as it is a very shallow pond, which is why it freezes over. How often it will freeze over this winter is anybody’s guess, but keen skaters can contact the Nelson Lakes Visitor Centre for an update on the ice.
