Down by three with the hammer coming home, Jim Vinson knew he'd have to thread his way through an eight-rock traffic jam to find the spot he wanted.
The legally-blind 100 Mile House skip had a chance to score four in the eighth and final end and win the game if he could successfully raise one of his own far enough to blast out the one blue stone causing him problems.
To displace that shot rock he needed a near-perfect shot but his aim was slightly off, allowing Russ Gervais and his Prince George crew to hang one more number on the scoreboard, giving them a 9-5 victory to celebrate Sunday at the provincial blind curling championship.
"The shot was there but with my sweeper in front of me calling line I couldn't see what happened, I don't know if I was inside or outside," said Vinson.
For Gervais, the Prince George skip, Sunday's win at the Prince George Golf and Curing Club was his first over Vinson in three years with his new team and it clinched second place in the four-team standings. Gervais was counting his good fortune, knowing he'd dodged a couple bullets when Vinson missed.
"Today we made the shots we needed to and he gave us a couple - actually two ends he helped us out," said Gervais, 65, who started losing his peripheral vision at age 32 when he developed a condition known as retinitus pigmentosa.
Gervais was a sighted curler for 14 years, starting in Makwa, Sask., when he was 12 years old, but gave it up when he started working night shifts after he moved to Prince George in 1976. Prince George lead Terry Pipkey also learned how to curl before he lost his sight. But the game is still relatively new to third Eric Rosen and second Wendel Schwab, called in Sunday to replace Dennis Noonan, who was ill for Sunday's third and final draw.
Schwab, 35, is a graduate student at UNBC studying English, and this is his second year curling. He'd like to see more blind people take up the sport as an activity and to take advantage of the social aspect of curling.
"I've been legally blind my whole life and I love curling, this is the only sport I can do," said Schwab, who uses a stick attached to the curling rock handle and walks out of the hack, aiming his shot at the broom held right at the hog line by sighted guide Royce Angus.
"We're getting better and better as we go along. I can see things relatively well close up but they get all fuzzy and blurry the further away you go and I can't see down to the other end. I sometimes wonder if a large part of it is luck, but it's a lot of fun.
"Everybody who has vision problems should come out and curl. I know sometimes there's a problem in our community where people tend to stay home and not come out at all and that's unfortunate. This helps get people out."
Lori Fry, the 100 Mile House third, has near-total visual impairment with only 1.5 per cent of what would be considered full vision. Standing at the hack, she is unable to see the hog line, 33 feet away. She sees checkerboard patterns with permanent strobe flashes of light. When she first started curling she found it distracting to try to aim her shots using a flashlight mounted on a broom or attached to a card placed on the ice, as other blind curlers do, and now uses no visual aids. Fry wears a visor to block overhead lights and releases in a crouch out of the hack, just as a sighted curler would, aiming her shots based on instructions offered by coach Linda Peterson.
"She tells me where the skip has his broom located, the weight he wants and what kind of turn he wants and in my mind I try to visualize where he's standing based on what she's told me, but a lot of it is guesswork," said Fry, now in her seventh year of curling.
Lead Vern Short of Kamloops and second Marilyn Vinson are the other members of the 100 Mile House team.
In blind curling, two points are awarded for each end a team wins and the team that wins the game earns 10 points. If there is a blank end, the teams each get a point. If the score is tied after eight ends, each team gets five points.
In the final tally Sunday, Prince George beat 100 Mile House 20-6. Gervais opened the tournament Saturday with an 18-8 win over Vancouver, then lost the afternoon draw 20-6 to Kelowna.
Overall, Prince George finished second with 44 points. Kelowna (skipped by Donna Loewen) won with 53 points. Loewen beat Vancouver 20-6 and tied 100 Mile House 13-13.
100 Mile House ended up third with 39 points and Vancouver (skipped by Rob Camozzi) was fourth with 20.
The winning rink will represent B.C. at the 2018 national championship in Ottawa. As the second- and third-place finishers, Prince George and 100 Mile House qualify for the eight-team Western Canadian championship in Winnipeg, March 15-18.
