Taking Advantage of any Raised Seams on a Synthetic Lawn Bowling Carpet

About a dozen years ago, immediately after a torrential downpour in Toronto, I had my big umbrella up and was standing on the edge of the green at James Gardens LBC. The green was a synthetic, sandalled carpet about 10 years old. Where the puddles had formed gave a true picture of the otherwise undetectable small hills and vales on the surface. Only in a very hard rainfall, where water can flow from the high spots to the low ones, could it reveal a true picture. With less rainfall, the variable permeability of different spots would complicate the picture. What stood out was that the seams in the synthetic carpet were distinctly elevated. Even where there was a relatively deep puddle, if a seam passed through the middle of it, that seam remained mostly above water.

These seams on an outdoor bowling surface can run either parallel to the boundaries of a rink, perpendicular to the centre line of the rink, or diagonal, or from corner to corner across the entire green. How to take advantage of raised seams depends upon the layout. Moreover, when playing away from your home club, you will not be able to know whether any seams in a synthetic carpet can deflect bowls or not. Playing on your home club’s green, however,  you might have some knowledge either from a bad experience or from seeing the surface after a rain downpour, as I did.

If any seams are running perpendicular to the centre line, you can safely ignore them. All bowls, no matter how strong their bias, will be least affected in this configuration.

If any seams run parallel to the rink boundaries, if they are raised in any local area, they can cause a bowl to straighten or back up. The side of the rink most afflicted by a seam may present an obstacle, particularly as a bowl slows down as it enters the head. A common illustration of this that many of us have experienced is how a bowl can get caught on the edge of a ground sheet as it approaches a jack resting thereon. If you are required to play on such a surface, it is wise to use your bowls with the widest bias. It is narrow bias bowls that are most susceptible to backing up on such raised seams.

The seams at James Gardens, as with many synthetic carpets, ran diagonally from one corner to the opposite corner on the square green. To avoid deflections by raised seams in this situation, the hand that delivers a bowl that crosses any seam as nearly perpendicular as possible as it approaches the jack should be preferred. Any interaction with a raised seam when your bowl is moving rapidly, immediately after release, can be safely ignored. The interaction will be minor, and what little there might be is taken into account in the election of your aim line.

Whatever the orientation of the seams in a synthetic carpet surface, a fully aware skip, having seen suggestive evidence, will recognize the significance of the location of a seam and will take it into account for the advantage of his/her team.

For example, when such a diagonal raised seam runs close and just behind the jack, { illustrated in the left-most half of the diagram showing seams as solid diagonal lines} bowling so that the shot comes in towards the jack on a trajectory as parallel as possible to the seam will act to correct the line of the shot and reduce any tendency for the bowl to run much behind the jack.
Alternately, when such a diagonal raised seam runs close and just in front of a jack, { illustrated in the right-most half of the diagram showing seams as dashed diagonal lines}, the best hand to play is the one that crosses the seam as close to a right angle as possible, as it slows down.

At the same time as I point these considerations out, I need to remind readers that the presence of raised seams on a synthetic carpet bowls surface is normally a minor consideration. Other factors regarding the head position itself and the strengths and weaknesses of the bowler on the mat will most often take precedence in choosing the hand for the shot.

It can be kept in mind, but not be top of mind. A case where it gets higher priority consideration would be a lead’s deliveries into a completely open head.