Friday recap and lots of pix

Today, they gave me a fancy SLR camera to use rather than my simple point-and-shooter jobber. Definitely an upgrade, but I still had a little trouble with the autofocus centering on the wrong thing. So beware, there are a few blurry ones in the lot.

I've uploaded them to Picasa so you can view them all there as a slideshow, along with the rest of them from this week. Enjoy!

Vibram Open: Friday (batch 1)

Vibram Open: Friday (batch 2)

Today was the first day of tournament action at the Vibram Open. I got there about 10:30 and started playing with my newly-issued camera. After watching a few people in the putting contest, I headed over to tee one where several groups were waiting to tee off. Most of the guys looked anxious and seemed to just want to get that first bomb over the pond over with.

Some guys were wearing old MSDGC and Vibram shirts from years past. It was like a living history exhibit.

Next I walked down to the pond to chat with Chris Roberts and his disc-diving dog Bear. Bear is pretty well-known along the East coast for his diving for wet discs. Today he gathered almost 30 discs from two different ponds. He actually dives under the water, swims around, and comes up with the disc in his mouth. Truly amazing! Chris is a real friendly guy, so be sure to say hi and thanks when you see him out there this weekend.

I spent most of the day roaming the course taking pictures and helping spot. I saw Schultz on a few holes as he absolutely devoured it. After 10 holes, he already had 6 deuces and 4 pars on some pretty difficult holes. He ended with a white-hot 49. Even though he was in a zone and focused, he still thanked the spotters on each hole. Classy.

While I was at the bottom of hole 13, I saw two near aces. Feldberg and one other guy threw lasers straight down the hill that missed the chains by inches. Jenkins also pured the fairway and blasted into the dirt embankment about 15 ft away. Very cool to witness.

Later in the afternoon, Steve D and I helped out with the long drive contest and ran all over the place finding each drive. It's not that easy finding discs in a field filled with Christmas trees, especially when discs are flying at you left and right. I think we did pretty well though considering our brains were nearly fried by then.

Back at Tourney Central, golfers were coming into the relative cool of the barn to count their scores and then pass in the scorecard to either Jeff L or Brian G. It got a little hectic in there toward the end as people were anxious to see the top scores, round ratings, and Saturday's tee times. Barry's 49 was rated a 1101.

Evidently some dinner was served (I missed that!) and a ping pong tournament broke out that Tom Southwick won over Billy Dunne.

When I left at 9:00, about 30 guys had hit the poker table for some late night action. They must all have late tee times tomorrow!

Out in the far parking lot, I met a group from Maryland feasting on a little New England lobster and corn on the cob. They were pretty pumped to have fresh lobster for a change.

The whole hour ride home, Derek Hopkins and I talked disc golf and only disc golf. Derek is from CA and is staying at the Plastic household for the tournament. Several locals have opened their homes to our out-of-town golfers and are showing some genuine Yankee hospitality. We're wicked nice, kid. ;-)

That's all for tonight. Good luck Saturday. Make the cut. Get paid.

Tom defends the homeland




We are not from Delaware!