Don’t give Up On Your Aim Line Just Because One Bowl Misfires

Part of my practice routine is to bowl between two chalk marks separated by a space the diameter of a jack. These two marks are placed 5 meters in advance of the front edge of the mat.

 This way I get unambiguous visual feedback about how precise my control of line is. But, when I was doing this, I discovered a curious thing. Sometimes my line is right-on-the-money but still the bowl ends up very far away from the resting place of all the other practice bowls delivered before and after the suspect one. If I was in a competition, I might take this bad outcome from a single delivery as evidence that my line was wrong and I might deliver the next bowl wider or narrower as the case required. What this practice evidence showed me was that such a change could be completely wrong. I may just have encountered a misfire. The right course is probably just to continue subsequent bowling with no change in aim line. It is only if you are hitting your aim line- and two consecutive bowls go errant in the same way- that it is proven that it is your aim line that needs to change.

I got these sometimes erratic results on a synthetic carpet using fairly narrow Taylor Vector VS bowls while bowling diagonally on the green from corner to corner. (I do this to practice the firmer delivery I need on the slower natural grass.)  I could actually see, in the case of some of these misfired bowls, that the bowl tried to get over a seam, failed,

’backed up’, and came at the seam again. Therefore, this observation might not be general but just particular to narrow bowls on a fast  synthetic surface with slightly raised seams. Because changing after one errant bowl has caused me problems before though, I don't think so.