An excellent evening was had by all with a wide range of curling skills on show, both notable and woeful.
Overall winner and recipient of the Loving Cup was Steve Laux with an exceptional gross score of 23 points.
There was a tie for winners of the handicap Kettle trophy between Colin Appleby and John Waterlow, each with 22 points. They will have the honour of sharing and polishing the trophy over the coming year.
There were 12 participants, around the usual number for this event and about right as it avoids too much waiting in the cold between exercises – there being no sweeping to warm up with.
We used the RCCC Points Competition Rules and Diagrams as usual, but to avoid repeating the same exercises each year, we continued with our recent policy of taking a different start point and order. This time we started with Exercise 9, “Drawing Through a Port”, before going down through the odd numbers. So next was Exercise 7, “Raising”, then Exercise 5, “Chap and Lie”, and so on. As a result the more difficult exercises came at the beginning and things became progressively easier thereafter.
As ever, we only managed half a dozen of the ten prescribed exercises although the last one was Exercise 10, “Outwicking”, back at the difficult end of the scale and probably the most fiendish of the lot. Given that it involves sending a stone down the outer edges of the ice sheet, we felt obliged to alert the occupants of the adjacent sheet of the danger of being clipped on the ankles by an errant stone.
A quick look at the results bears out the relative difficulty of the various exercises. At the high end of the scale, between us we managed just nine points for “Drawing Through a Port” and fared little better on “Outwicking” with 11 points. In contrast, Exercise 1, “Striking”, accumulated an outstanding joint total of 61 points.
Steve’s inspired overall victory led his current skip in the league, David Morrison, to conclude that he would be far better off standing to one side and letting Steve decide where and how to deliver his stones.
At the end of proceedings a convivial drink accompanied our esteemed President’s announcement of the results and awarding of the trophies – both of which are now at the engravers in order to record the winners names on them for posterity. They will be returned to the winners at our AGM at the end of the season.
Just to be clear, Holyrood rules are that the winner of the overall points title is ineligible for the handicap trophy.
Holyrood Curling Club 