Bridge Blog 1119: St. Catharines Sectional

Come to think about it, the St. Catharines Sectional is designed for out-of-towners who stay in or around the host hotel with nothing to do in the evening. (What's to do in St. Catharines on a weekend? Go to Hamilton?) Why else would game times for pairs Friday and Saturday be 1 and 7 p.m., instead of 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., like they are at the Buffalo sectionals? Not conducive for good relations with significant others who aren’t there in St. Catharines, too.

So me and my Canadian partner, Selina Volpatti, partook only of the afternoon pairs game on Friday. And even that plan was in doubt until Friday morning because of the other thing about this tournament – the weather. It's almost always bad. Sure enough, winter storm warnings were up.

But how bad could it be? Given the Ontario highway maintenance system, I had complete faith in road conditions. The Queen Elizabeth Way would be clear all the way to Ontario Street in St. Catharines. To confirm it, I took a look at camera views online. Black pavement. 

What I hadn’t considered was that, with a steady light snow falling, those Ontario highway maintainers might be running snowplows side by side on the QEW for half the trip from the Peace Bridge to Niagara Falls. 25 mph (40 k/h) at their speediest. No passing.

At least conditions improved the further I went. The snowplows pulled aside. I outran the snow. Slushy slurry at Fort Erie became merely wetness on the Skyway over the Welland Canal. But did I arrive 15 to 30 minutes before game time, like I expected? Noooo. More like a nail-biting 12:55.

What felt like a successful game turned into dismay when we punched the Bridge Mate’s button for results after the final round. 45%. Fourteenth among 20 pairs, seventh in the B strat.

(But wait, here on Sunday afternoon I just found my email from ACBL Live. We had 48.27%, finished sixth, just good enough to scratch out 0.30 of a silver point.)

We’ll do better Sunday in the Swiss teams, we promised one another. Although we didn’t have the other half of our team (I’d been asking people all week), I put my name in with partnership chairman Marg Dykstra and waited for a call.

No call Saturday. Then Selina texts me to say she’s going to Toronto with her daughters instead on Sunday. I message Marg saying I’m available as a single. She emails back to say, essentially, don’t bother. I get an unexpected day and night off.

In the meantime, I consoled myself with a second-place finish at the Airport Bridge Club with my new Saturday date, Sharon Chang, who’s proving to be a most delightful partner. Our 58% effort rewarded us with 1.77 points.