Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Oh Happy Day

I think the hat was meant to be a tennis stick cover

Surely all of us dart players know what it feels like to be beaten by someone who picks the darts up for the first time and just play the game for a laugh. It hurts. They never play you again, or anyone else for that matter, so you don't get the chance to exact any sort of pathetic revenge.

So imagine my glee to beat Deborah at tennis whilst on Holiday. She used to practice and everything. She thinks she's dead good. I beat her on pure serve and volley 6 love. To top it all I've laid the old tennis bat down and I won't give her a chance to, erm, exact any sort of pathetic revenge :o)

League season opens next Tuesday

We had some great news at our informal practice night tonight as the fixtures were pinned up on the board ; as it stands all of last season's teams are still present with the addition of The Moorcock, so we'll have 16 teams.

The Moorcock is a typical old fashioned pub up on the moors and they have a very strong team. We had a great couple of Friendly games against them in October 2005 so I'm really pleased they have joined our league. We play them in December and I'm looking forward to it.


We open our season against The Castleside next Tuesday.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

League News

Pictured : A practice shot on Doubles

I don't have any firm news to confirm from the recent League meeting, but at this stage it seems there will be at least as many teams competing in 2008/9 as last season.

This is good news, as I suspected one or two might drop out. One still may drop out, but we definately have a new addition. As soon as I have the starting 15 / 16 I'll publish the teams here.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Chelmsford 5 - 5 Wheatsheaf (2nd leg, Friendly)

Our team were missing three people from last week's game and we only just managed to field 6 players. A large party arrived from The Weatsheaf though, and we had a good night.

As with the previous week we made a really strong start and raced to a 3-0 lead before Wheatsheaf pulled it back and made it 5-5 in the final Singles game of the evening.

This will probably be our last game before the season starts in September, so it was good to put in a decent performance with a team line-up which could be fairly close to the team we'll be fielding next season.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

New board, and a new personal 501 record

I've had the Unicorn Ecipse dart board for a few days now, and I now have a new personal best to break it in with - a 13 darter in a 501 game, which is an average of 115.62 per throw. The scores were 140, 140, 100, 81, and a D20 with the first dart. This is by far the best leg I've ever played. The other legs I played tonight were rubbish, but these brief highlights give me encouragement.

There have been no bounce outs whatsoever from the Unicorn Eclipse yet. The wiring is superb, and it is a huge improvement over the Winmau Blade III I've been using since August 2005. There are design problems with the Blade series which cause the wires to become raised from the board, and the treble wires can become flattened in a strange spider's web pattern.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

One Week Trial - Titanium Stems

My trial of the Harrows "Silver" Short Titanium stems didn't go too well. They were too short for me, so I'll have to try the Medium ones to give them a proper airing. The short length caused inbalance on my 27g 5cm darts, so as mentioned I'll need the longer version to get a fair result.

Until then there are just a couple of observations ; some of the stems I received were not perfectly machined and did not spin "true" in the hand, so for every couple of packets you may need to bin the odd one. Also, the thread on the stem to attach the flight holder was incredibly fine and I'd prefer a chunky thread. I just didn't have confidence that these replacement tops would survive any sort of serious punishment with such a fine thread.

One very surprising positive is that you get a nice reflection on the dome part of the stem which acts as a strong guide for subsequent throws. I find this really helpful, as it allows you to concentrate on the throw and block out distractions. No other stem I've tried gives this type of reflection.