Part 4: Savage Halibut

These have to get a bit shorter. It’s August 14 and I’m blogging about the events of the July 28 & 29. At this rate I’ll spend all of 2009 blogging about 2008. This is the last entry on my drive up the east coast of Australia a few weeks ago. Also, all this blogging about the past has my tenses all wacked up.

We arrived in Brisbane Friday night. I had reserved some very cheap, accommodations that turned out to be ‘riverside’ which also meant right on the freeway. The truck traffic shook the building day and night. The neighborhood was super sketch and only blocks from a racetrack. (I’m only telling you this now mom because nothing was stolen or harmed in anyway.)

For the big finish of the tour I had decided to attend a fun coed tournament in Brisbane, Queensland called Halibut. It’s one of the bigger co-ed tournaments held annually here in Australia. Co-ed, also called Mixed ultimate, is entirely separate from the club season here, and is played by Open and Women’s club players in the off season. There is a separate co-ed nationals tourney, which is coming up in September.

I don’t have a regular coed team here that was going to Halibut so I e-mailed the Tournament Director asking if I could pick up with a team. Instead, I was assigned to the pick-up team, and by virtue of sending an e-mail promoted to ‘captain’ of that team which meant reporting scores and nagging folks for entry fees.

The tournament was in a nice park just about 20 minutes north of Brisbane downtown. It was very dry up there (there were even bush fires that every weekend) and the fields were dry and hard. The tournament had 16 teams. The pick up team, named by the TD ‘Lost at Sea’ was a skeleton crew. We had 6 players for a weekend of 7 on 7 where most of the teams we were playing had 18 -20 players. It was going to be a long weekend. We played mostly savage (no subs) for the weekend, though teams that were having a bye sometimes sent a player or two over to help us out. I wasn’t planning on playing the entire tournament savage, so I got a bit tired and lost most of the skin on my feet. We didn’t match up well against any of the ‘real teams’ that had come to the tourney but we had a few good points. I handled most of the weekend, which was good practice. We also played a lot of zone and I ran a lot of cup, so that’s good exercise I guess. It was good weather and fun to be outside and all in all a pretty well run tournament that was not entirely different than one in the states. (Better lunch?)

After our last game on Sunday, our only victory, We returned the rental car (Hamish) and flew back to Melbourne’s Avalon airport. I slept during the 2 hour flight, but still managed to be quite exhausted when I arrived in Melbourne, took the bus back to 301 and faced up to the reality that I had work the next day.