Camerton & Peasedown Croquet Club
…. friendly, welcoming, inclusive
CPCC Hosted a B-Level tournament on Tuesday 6th May. Patrick, Nigel and Des made the cut and were allocated places in this prestigious competition.
A couple of highlights were Patrick’s two 7-1 wins, Nigel’s relatively good morning helping him into the top half, but most impressively, Des lost only one game all day and won the Plate Jelly Babies!
We’re well into the season now and the matches are coming thick and fast. And, whisper it softly, CPCC are doing rather well.
Today the 5+ Level Ply B Team trundled off to Bath for a local derby. Don’t they look smart! The result? A resounding 12-8 victory.
The high handicap team went away to Bristol today and a) ate yummy cake and b) played on and on and on. As the sun went down, and with only a couple of games still to play CPCC were leading 10.5 to 7.5. With the match won they decided to call it a day. The longevity of the match was mostly due to the lawns being double-banked so there was much waiting around for other games to progress. Still, a sunny and happy day all round.
The AC Intermediate League team welcomes Nailsea to CPCC. The result? A 6-1 victory. WhatsApp came alight with the following comments …
What a team! Considering how much we practice it’s almost miraculous. It must be pure talent- yeah right? Well done.
Congratulations all. In AC lingo that’s known as a “right drubbing”!
Camerton & Peasedown Croquet Club (CPCC) have entered two teams this year into the Golf Croquet 5+ level play league organised by the South West Federation of croquet clubs. One of the league rules is that where there are two teams from one club entered in the same league they must play each other before playing anyone else. So the first match of the season was CPCC ‘A’ against CPCC ‘B’.
The day started well for the ‘B’ team and at the halfway point the score was 6 games to 4 with the ‘B’ team in the lead. In the afternoon the ‘A’ team held on and managed to win both of their doubles matches. Waiting for the last game to be completed the score was 10 games to the ‘A’ team and 9 to the ‘B’ team. Like many of the games in this match the final game was very close with a score of 7 hoops to 6. This win secured a draw for the ‘B’ team. The best performances were from Trish Naish for the ‘B’ team and Nigel Wulcko for the ‘A’ team who both won all their singles matches with Nigel Wulcko improving his handicap.
On Saturday 12th April a team from CPCC competed in Division 3 of the South West Federation Spring short croquet tournament at Nailsea. The CPCC team was Mark Godfrey-James, Si Dunk, Ann Munton and Simon Munton.
There were 5 teams in Division 3 (Bristol Boys, Bath Buns, Budleigh Salterton Roquets, Taunton Deane Terriers and CPCC A*). At the end of the day CPCC took the trophy having won 12 out of their 16 games. Si won all 4 of his games and improved his handicap.
* I think we need to come up with a more interesting name than CPCC A for our team. Any ideas?
Between fifteen and twenty optimists attended the three recent “Improvers” sessions. In week one we figured out what we could do better; in week two we did some fun (?) practicing and in week three we went for “strategy overload”. Everyone said they’d enjoyed it. Time will tell as over the season we expect to see those handicaps tumble!
The annual spring one ball competition was well attended and won by Phil! He was rewarded with sweeties from the organiser, Mo.
Today we turned our winter lawns by 90°, enlarged them and re-positioned all our hoops. 11 of the club chaps turned out and spent about three hours measuring, unwinding string, winding string, marking, painting, drilling, hammering, swearing and finally … playing!
It started out on Wednesday locating the 16 corners for our new lawns. Each lawn is a rectangle 105 feet x 84 feet. We (more or less) created the required four massive rectangles to within an inch or so. The only minor impediment was a hail storm that briefly turned the lawns white.
On Thursday, in addition to the four large lawns we created two half-lawns, to be used for Short Croquet club play and matches. At times you could barely see the grass for the hoops.
Each hoop has two sets of holes, one for regular club play and the others we keep for ‘best’ to be only used for competitions and matches against other clubs. The hoops are set with a clearance of about one-eight of an inch either side of the ball. Over the winter we have been blessed with somewhat wider hoops, very popular with the membership as they have been easy to run. Championship hoops are often set with one sixty-fourth of an inch clearance, so it could be worse!
Tomorrow morning our ground-keepers are booked to mark the new white lines. We have started them off with some neat corner-painting.
… and here is the motley crew who undertook all this work. Well done chaps, see you in the Autumn when we do it all again.
Today’s work in numbers…
We’re very lucky as a club to have so many gifted members who are always up for a challenge. Setting hoops is a precision job and one of the tools of the trade is a clamp hoop. This ensures the hoops are of a consistent width; not too tight and not too loose.
Croquet England advertise a splendid clamp hoop on their website. A snip at £185.90!
Slightly taken aback by this reasonably priced piece of equipment, Phil sourced not one, but two clamps on eBay. They come in twos and cost £16. He then modified it to widen the jaws and created a clever adjustable gizmo to control the hoop width. It worked brilliantly. A saving to the club of £169.90! I think he should go into business undercutting the competition.
Next challenge … to produce a few perfectly pink secondary balls!