Curlers celebrate 50 years
IT was time to celebrate 50 years of ‘‘fellowship, friendship and camaraderie on the ice’’ for the Lowburn Curling Club in the weekend.
Club president Gordon Stewart said the club invited five teams from across Central Otago — Alexandra, Arrowtown, Cardrona, Manorburn and Poolburn — to join in the festivities with five Lowburn teams, for a competition at the Alexandra IceInLine rink on Saturday.
This year, temperatures did not fall far enough to allow ice to form on the club’s pond in Lowburn, near Cromwell, so it rented the Alexandra rink.
Mr Stewart did his best to remember back to 1968.
‘‘In those days, milk from school had just been cancelled but to compensate, the government extended hotel opening hours to 10 o’clock at night.’’
But although he had only been a member of the club since the 1990s, he could tell you the club’s history without haste.
‘‘Lowburn has had a pretty proud record, our teams have performed well and won most of the [Central Otago] competitions, including the [Idaburn Dam] bonspiel in 2007.’’
There were some classic memories through the years, he said.
‘‘A person did go through the ice at Lowburn, floundering around in the ice screaming ‘help me, help me’, when one of the older members in the club house at the time stuck
his head out of the door and said ‘stand up . . . the thing’s only a metre deep!’ ’’
Mr Stewart said the club’s 45 members were aware the sport could be more about luck than skill.
‘‘More than most sports, a pretty average team can beat a very good one, so there’s quite an element of luck in the way we play but we don’t like to think so. We think it’s all skill.’’
On Saturday evening, the celebrations continued with a haggis ceremony and dinner at The Moorings restaurant near Cromwell.