After Parkrun yesterday my son decided he wanted to enter the All England Stone Skimming Championships which were being held in the same park. There was quite a queue to sign up as the competition was open to all ages with no qualification. At £3 for an adult and £1 for an under 11 it was a well priced event too. Our first task was to choose from the selection of skimmers that the South Cumbria Rivers Trust had supplied:
Its all to do with the size of your hand and how they fit when you are preparing to throw them! Then we had to wait to take our turn at skimming and first of all we watched some of the seasoned experts; such as Ron Long The Old Tosser who has written an excellent post explaining how to skim stones.
Next up was Gareth Twamley who with his first stone broke the local record with an awesome 88m!!
The slightly choppy waters (and occasional straying waterfowl) weren't the ideal conditions for stone skimming:
However that didn't prevent my son from getting a creditable 21m on his first attempt:
This put him into 2nd place in his age group:
He did go back for a few more attempts to try and catch the 1st place person. I eventually joined the queue myself and I was right behind the reigning British champion Alex Lewis. To win the title he threw 107m but on Windermere he wasn't in quite such good form:
I really hope no-one captured my pathetic 7m skim... In future I will leave the skimming up to my son who really got into the competition:
Unfortunately he was gradually pushed down the leader board and his time in 3rd place was a short one:
The winner in his category threw 49m and next year he will be in the next category with throws up to 72m. Guess he needs to get practising...
