Lawn Bowls at Valverde LBC Portugal

My wife, Tish, and I bowled yesterday at the Valverde lawn bowls club in southern Portugal. The green is a dense grass cut nice and short with no discolorations or bare spots. If you took a picture from eye level looking down, you would not be able to tell whether it was a rug or grass. All the grass blades are packed tight standing straight up.  Even at 10:30AM it is nearly dry. I did not use my bowls cloth after the first few ends.

The game was open triples on two rinks and open pairs on two rinks; however, every six ends the teams, the team positions, the opponents and the rinks were changed. Everyone had their own score card and the individual best plus/minuses won cash prizes after three rounds. An interesting variant was that in the first two ends of the first mini-game the maximum score was 1. In this way no trial ends were needed. This format is played at Valverde every Friday and it affords the maximum opportunity for everybody to meet on the green.  I played skip twice and lead once. I was +5 on the day. My performance in the first match which we lost with me skipping put me out of the money. Consistency is everything in bowls!

A point of contention arose during one of the mini-games. My lead delivered a bowl that came to rest leaning in a standing position against the jack. I told my skip opposite that I was nominating that bowl as a toucher since I wouldn’t dare try to mark it because it could fall and push away the jack. As we changed positions and the skips were going to the mat, the opposing lead said that this was not correct nomination. When I said that it was, she declared “Perhaps according to your rules” or something to that effect.

No harm was done to me although I apologized to the opposing skip saying that I was afraid I had upset her. Anyway the rule from Crystal Mark Third Edition of the Laws of World Bowls reads:

15.2 If, in the opinion of either skip or opponent or the marker, a toucher comes to rest in a position in which marking it would be likely to move the bowl or alter the head, the bowl must not be marked but nominated as a toucher instead.

15.3 If, before the next delivered bowl comes to rest or, in the case of the last bowl of an end, before a period of 30 seconds that applies under law 23.1, a bowl is neither marked nor nominated, it is no longer a toucher.

This club is owned by its members and they say, justifiably, that it is the friendliest bowling club. A club member was immediately into the parking lot to greet us and show us around when we first found the place and the secretary of the club had even helped to find us suitable accommodation when we contacted her over the internet before we left for Portugal!

Here they do use rakes to collect the bowls. The bowls available for visitors are of more recent vintage than those on offer at Vilamoura LBC and they are carefully arranged according to size while those at Vilamoura were totally haphazard. The Valverde bowls for the most part have grips while Vilamoura’s mostly do not.

Valverde has a restaurant right next to it where I expect food and drinks would be available. When we arrived this was closed since January is a slow month for tourists. Vilamoura has a bar in the tiny club house with plenty of tables and chairs on the patio next to one of the two greens. Vilamoura has more parking and that parking is more accessible.

Both these clubs are thoroughly English. While on the greens you will not think you are in a foreign language country. If you are leaving winter behind for several months I suspect Portugal is better value than the southern United States. I will say more after I give the USA a winter trial some other year.