Breakfast @ 6:45am and morning classes in the hotel. Eddie and Bruce have taken over the morning class preparations for the next week. One of them has a strong pour..!!
As well as Keith being hors de combat, Tim and Tom are now sitting out with nasty looking cases of conjunctivitis. Hopefully we can keep it contained as we are down to one spare player and we are supposed to be fielding 5 teams tomorrow. Not easy with 17 players but we’ll find a solution.
Sherwood Park have definitely poured a lot of work and resource into hosting the Strathcona Cup. There were a lot of formalities pre game but at least we got to throw a few practise stones for the first time. The business manager here is Heather Nedohin and this is Randy Ferbey’s home rink.
Today was a really tough day’s curling with some really strong opposition. We tied overall for games won and lost but dropped 10 shots across the day. Amongst the opposition were James Pahl, skip of the reigning Canadian Seniors silver medal team and former second to Kevin Martin at the Brier, along with John Schmidt, who plays lead in James’ Seniors team. They were pretty awesome to watch in action and definitely at least a couple of levels above the likes of us. There were a lot of tops exchanged today amongst various team members. Bruce got one that was pretty cool from the Canadian Mounted Police Team.
Back to the hotel to change into number ones for our banquet dinner at the Club tonight. Speech from 3 time World Champion and 4 time Brier winner, David Nedohin, who threw last stones for the Ferbey Four for 13 years.
We were each presented with a commemorative hip flask (that will definitely get used), some engraved glasses, a multiple USB charger and an enormous book entitled “World Capital of Curling” written by Terry Jones.
Then we had a performance from a magician/comedian. Opinions vary on the entertainment factor.
Decent night all round but we have a few walking wounded now. Day 10 might be challenging just from the perspective of getting fit bodies on the ice.
Stephen McClymont