Pukerua Bay Doubles Tennis Tournament

The day after my game with Phil Seemann I was playing with Brian in a doubles tournament up at Pukerua Bay. So we put aside the fact he'd put a serve on to my nose the day before, boarded his vintage Holden and drove up the coast via a quick stop to feed his parents' cat.

I was still pretty wrecked from the day before so I was hoping it wouldn't be too hard a day. At least it was all going to be doubles.

We had a good 9-1 win in the first round. The quarter-final was a lot tougher, against a pair from Ngatitoa (who were promoted this season to Regional 1). Brian started in superb form and we got to 4-1 up mostly as a result of his excellent serving and big forehands. It was really windy and I was struggling on my own serve, getting broken as we lost our lead to go 6-4 down. I held my final couple of service games and we got a break back, to recover from 8-5 down to 8-7, but they played a very solid final game to wrap up a 9-7 win.

That consigned up to the consolation plate event! After much hanging around we won our plate matches 9-2 and then 9-0. We'll be appearing in the plate final on Monday.

Apart from the wind it was a nice sunny day, a very attractive club with great views out to the coast and a really friendly tournament. There was a lot of waiting around but the free tea and toasted hot cross buns were a big help with that. We got home around 8:30pm, 12 hours after setting off, and tried to patch things up with our girlfriends who'd been expecting us home about 4 hours earlier.