My mom didn’t text me saying she liked the last blog, so pressure is on now for this last one!

Camp has officially come to a close. We had our goodbye dinner Thursday night and there were Canucks fans there and it was a nice way to end the week. This team seems to have very passionate fans and they’re all so nice and welcoming to me. I appreciate that.

We had some fun scrimmages the last two days; not that I don’t love practice, but it was nice to have real game speed and action. First was a 5-on-5 Wednesday and I was paired with Troy Stecher, who is a very skilled player. We won the game.

Thursday afternoon was the big game. It was 5-on-5, then 4-on-4, then 3-on-3 before a shootout. I like to be on the ice playing, regardless of what the format. When it’s 5-on-5 there’s so many guys and everyone is buzzing around, then 4-on-4 it’s harder because you have to find your own guy and stay with him, then 3-on-3, I love it. I’m defenceman, but I get to play forward there and it’s so different and fun. We won that game too.

I did not win when it came to the shootout. I tried a bad deke and as you can see I’m not a forward and I have bad hands, I should have just taken a slammer or something. I didn’t even get it on net, I hope nobody filmed that!

Brett McKenzie just reminded me to talk about going to the Damage Control Training Facility Galiano! We visited them Thursday and it was very cool. I’d seen clips from stuff like that on Discovery Channel and it’s super cool what those guys are doing. Here in Canada it’s on such a big scale compared to in Finland and it was very impressive to see. It’s a very important job what those people are doing.

We got to take part in a challenge and I was lucky to be paired with McKenzie. We went down into a tank and it was filled with one third of water and it was scary, it was cold and we didn’t know what to do really. We had to fix the leaks and Brett led our team, I just watched more than anything! It was difficult because you had to hurry, but then not hurry too much because you didn’t want to mess up, you had to stop all that water from coming in. It was awesome. I was proud of us for doing so well and I thought we should have won. I guess the clock didn’t agree!

It has been a great week and very tiring week. I learned a lot and made a lot of great friends and now I’m excited to get a lot of sleep! I have a nice nine-and-a-half hour flight from Vancouver to London Friday night, so I have some sitting to do and will hopefully sleep some then. It’s nice to go back home and speak Finnish and see my girlfriend and just relax for a bit. It’s been going pretty fast for a few weeks here.

I’d like to thank you for reading this blog during camp and a special thank you to everyone at Shawnigan Lake for making my first camp so great! This is a very good organization and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Olli