Edwardsburg's Mike Evans took first place in Saturday’s ice-sculpting competition with a seal balancing boxes and balls. He also won in 2009. Evans works in food service at Notre Dame.

There has been no more consistent performer in recent years of Dowagiac’s 16-year-old Ice Time Festival than Edwardsburg’s Mike Evans, who works in food service at the University of Notre Dame.
Evans, wearing his trademark New York Mets cap, won first place for the second time Saturday with his ice-carved seal.

Evans took second in 2011 with a dragonfly and second and carvers’ choice in 2010 with abstract “Waves of Spheres” to Jim Houser’s precarious pachyderm, an elephant balanced on one foot.
“I wanted to step it up a notch,” Evans said. “This town hasn’t seen boxes, so I did it. It was so warm, it was very hard to keep the ice hard once you took it out of the cold box. It warmed up right away, so you had to put the cube in longer and keep going back and forth.”
Elements the seal balanced spent so much time shielded from sun in the first snow-free ice festival that the competition may have “thought it was just going to be a short seal,” Evans laughed.
“I’ve been carving about nine years.”
Timed carvings competing for $1,200 in cash prizes offered by the Chamber of Commerce were judged by Indiana sculptor John Mishler and city employee Sue Watson on behalf of Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.
“I really liked the way those blocks balanced on top,” said Mishler, who created the stainless steel kinetic sculpture “Wind Song” outside Dowagiac Middle School Performing Arts Center.
“I’d never seen one quite like that. And the way the smaller cubes balanced on the tail. I liked the contrast of that and the way the seal reached up. The goldfish had nice three-dimensional texture.”
Evans won his first title in 2009 with a squid. He placed second with a pagoda in 2008, when Andrew Thistlethwaite captured his third straight title with a goose after a pterodactyl in 2007 and a pheasant under glass in 2006.
In 2011, Lewis Center, Ohio, McGraw-Hill corporate chef Eric Pfaff debuted with a victory behind “Blade Jumper,” a glassy grasshopper.
Pfaff proved no slouch this year, either, finishing second with the goldfish he carved  with the 440-pound block sponsored by Leader Publications.
Third went to “Cupid” carved by John Crumpacker of Avon, Ind., on the west side of Indianapolis.“It’s been a couple of years” since he competed here.
While sunny, snow-free weather wasn’t conducive to carving, it brought out some of the largest crowds ever seen at Ice Time.