Holyrood Curling Club

Team B (John Mac) vs Team C (Deemo) 3rd March 2022

With John Macc still injured, Team B was acting-skipped by Rob, with Billy at third, Fiona chose to stay at lead, and John Waterlow kindly stood in at second. Team C, already comfortably the season’s league champs, were at their full strength with Dee, then Richard, then James and skip Deemo.

Preliminaries began with the now-traditional game of rock/paper/scissors, as we all guess between an open handshake or a fist bump – usually something messy midway; and of coin tossing which Dee won. Then masks off and action got underway out on lane 7, shooting towards the gallery end, with team B in yellow.

The ice was surprisingly keen for a first end and a couple of stones sailed through, but after a dozen stones one yellow was counting half-guarded. Both of Rob’s stones were primarily intended as guards, but each ran on a bit and curled in, to sit into a neat line astern, which Deemo’s final stone couldn’t nudge, so team B got off to a steal of 3.

Next end Fiona’s lead stone sat virtually on the button, with a short blue largely guarding, onto which John laid a nice off-centre freeze to rule out any raise. Deemo switched attention to the left side, and a threatening group of blues developed in the house, but Billy laid a canny guard which Rob maintained, so that lead stone ended up as being the counter stealing another one shot.

Third end had some good draws behind guards, but Deemo played a dependable skip’s last-stone draw, to ensure one counter became two.

The next two ends saw continuing tight play, with a single scored with the hammer in each. One highlight was when Rob confidently asked John to draw though a port of a stone’s width + maybe 2cms, and the stone curled beautifully down plumb through, to smack out the counting stone and lie. Unenviably, it was James who was of course asked to ‘do the same’, but that one nicked against the gateposts.

Sixth end saw plenty of stones in the house until Deemo’s last stone fizzed down to crack an angled double takeout and lie, leaving four blues suddenly counting! Rob had some room down the right for last stone and line was good, but it ran on by a foot or so, though it did at least reduce the damage to two.

So final end 5 -5 …but Team B with hammer. It developed quite nicely with yellow having stones spaced around the 12-foot and an open centre. Then counters began on the left wing, with the third’s trading shot stones. Deemo’s first landed a counter, which Rob’s first knocked back to lie, but then Deemo’s last came up just short, so the final stone wasn’t needed in the end.

6 – 5 in the end to Team B, really excellent game. Rock/paper to finish off, masks back on.

Rob Garner.

Team A (Dougie) vs Team C (Deemo) 1st March 2022

Points Competition 24th February 2022

The Holyrood Points Competition attracted a good turnout with 11 of us vying to take home either the coveted Loving Cup (also affectionately known as the Elephant’s Foot – obvious when you see the size of the trophy’s plinth) which is awarded to the overall winner, or the traditional Kettle which goes to the winner on handicap.

This annual test of individual skills produced a wide range of scores. It is surprising just how difficult it is to adapt to making one’s own judgement about where to deliver the stone and at which weight without the benefit of a skip waving his brush around at the other end of the rink. And the absence of sweeping is noticeable too, although it is permissible to chase one’s second stone in each direction to try and do something about the appalling delivery that one realises one has just made.

We undertook the standard order of the various exercises as laid out by the Royal Caledonian Curling Club http://royalcaledoniancurlingclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/2011-Points-Competition-Rules-Diagrams-and-Scorecard-Web-Version.pdf

The first exercise, Striking, produced a fine crop of scores, including a perfect eight from our president, Dougie. The next, Inwicking, was much more difficult with a fair number of perfect zeros and no big scores – more practise is obviously needed. However, we did well at guarding which also played to our strengths. Overall six exercises were completed, the last being Wick and Curl In which was clearly a challenge (or perhaps we were flagging) as only Deemo, Bob and Rob managed to score anything at all.

Everyone repaired to the bar afterwards and started the post mortem while Dougie and John W furiously added up the scores and applied their carefully crafted handicaps to the results.

In terms of the total gross score, Dougie, Ken and Billy were third equal with 16 points, Deemo second at 19 and John W overall winner with 22 points. So John W had the dubious privilege of carrying home the weighty Loving Cup to put on his creaking sideboard with a mental note to remember to polish it regularly.

The handicapped scores resulted in a tie for second place between Fiona and Ken on 19 points while the net winner was Deemo with 20 points.

It only remained for the presentations of the gleaming trophies to be made by El Presidente to the lucky winners. Here special mention must be made about the Kettle which was in the most pristine state anyone had seen in years – last time’s winner, Colin, said his wife had polished it with a toothbrush! That is going to be a hard act to follow.