Given that Marietta's Jim Duggan spends countless hours every week inside an 18-degree freezer carving swans and corporate logos from massive blocks of ice, you'd expect his idea of a vacation to include sipping a tequila sunrise while watching the sunset over some balmy beach.
But no, Duggan and three other metro ice carvers are chilling right now in Fairbanks, Alaska, where as members of the Atlanta Ice Marvels team, they are competing in the BP World Ice Championships. And when we say chilling, we mean serious brrr: The low Saturday night -- when the winner of the main event, the Multi-Block Classic World Ice Championship, is to to be announced -- is predicted to be minus 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wait, ice carvers from Georgia, which has essentially skipped winter this year, competing in the frozen 49th state in a 132-hour competition for which giant ice blocks are "harvested" from a nearby lake? Why that's almost as unlikely as that Jamaican bobsled team that captured the world's imagination when it competed in the 1988 Olympics.
That's a comparison Duggan heard over and over after the Ice Marvels, a team composed of carvers who normally compete against each other for business in metro Atlanta, finished fourth out of 23 contenders in the Multi-Block Classic in 2011. The newly formed Marvels traveled the farthest from the U.S. to compete, though there were also units at this United Nations of ice artists from as far away as China, Slovakia and Mongolia.
The whole time in Alaska, the Georgia crew pledged that they planned to sell their Hotlanta houses and move to the Fairbanks tundra. It became such a widely circulated har-har that the announcer even repeated the line when she called up the fourth-place finishers.
To a man, the Marvels would much rather work in a freezer than live in one, but they knew they'd be back.
"It was like Disney World for us," said Duggan, whose teammates this year are Atlantans Victor Dagatan, Glenn Hughes and Joel McRae and a ringer from Ohio, Jeff Meyers. "We had a great time getting to meet all these great carvers from around the world. And for our first time out, we turned a lot of heads."
Along with the thrill of a fourth-place finish, there was the agony of the feet -- Duggan's feet specifically. Outfitted in boots that were supposed to provide protection to minus 40 degrees, he lost the feeling in two of his toes by the competition's end, not regaining it for six months.
There were other hard-learned lessons for the rookies, including that power cords will snap like twigs when temperatures drop lower than negative 25e degrees. To ensure fewer equipment failures this year, the Ice Marvels are storing their saws of myriad sizes, chisels and grinders in a heated crate, and they've rented a car so they can zoom to a hardware store for more power cords and other replacement equipment as needed.
Clearly a man who enjoys tools of the sort not often seen outside of horror flicks, Duggan also invested $1,000 in a new saw boasting a 3-foot cutting bar. "It's my baby," he exclaims. "It's a gas saw, so in case we're having power issues, we can keep rockin'."
When you're carving 10 3,000-pound blocks of ice (each 6 feet by 4 feet by 3 feet), you don't pussyfoot around.
After creating a multi-figure display last year depicting Pinocchio's transformation from wooden puppet into breathing boy, the Atlanta Ice Marvels this year are working on a tribute to frequent Japanese gold medalist Junichi Nakamura and competition organizer Ice Alaska.
The 132-hour marathon began Sunday morning and concludes Friday night. Duggan thinks the Atlanta team will do better this year because it learned a lot about pacing itself -- getting going early but knocking off for dinner, not greeting the dawn.
"You gotta take care of yourself to be there on the last day," Duggan said. "You gotta eat, sleep and really stay focused and realize you can't do it all in one day. The entire experience is a test."
One test he passed, barely, last year came when a huge chunk of ice came loose and was flying in the direction of Duggan, who was two stories up on scaffolding. Fortunately, it hit a safety bar and fell harmlessly away, but, having seen his 38 years of life flashing before him, he didn't sleep well that night and felt off his game the next day.
But so far, so good this year. While Duggan and Glenn Hughes (making his first Alaska appearance) didn't take a top prize in the single-block competition, their teammate Dagatan joined forces with Japanese star Nakamura to win the gold. The Marvels, who Duggan's company sponsored to the tune of $10,000 last year and who are being partly sponsored by Stone Mountain Park this year, hope it will be a good omen for their chances in the multi-block contest.
"The weather is perfect and the ice is blue and beautiful," Duggan e-mailed The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from his iPhone on Monday. "We are planning on working late because the northern lights are going to be active."
In other words, his new boots, supposedly safe down to minus 140 degrees, will get a true test. And if it sounds like Duggan is digging in, he is. Before last year's competition, the Marvels sat down together and committed to a decade-long push to bring the gold home to the sunny South.
"This is a 10-year commitment to not only win a championship but to defend a world championship," he said. "We're serious about it, and and if we never do, look at all the good stories we'll have."
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