The rule that opposites attract had nothing to do with the magnetic personality traits that brought Cindy and Nelson Shillito together as soulmates.
They both happen to love carpet bowling, which was how they met.
Both love to travel, which made it an easy decision to leave their home in Chemainus to make the long journey to Prince George this week for the Carpet Bowling Association of B.C. provincial championships.
And both are accurate left-handed shooters, forming a deadly combination Friday in the triples event with Chemainus skip Alan Knight on the deep green carpets of the Hart Pioneer Centre.
Cindy and Nelson met at the Chemainus Seniors Centre on a summer day in 2011 and Cindy challenged him to a game of carpet bowling, which he gladly accepted. That led to Nelson's offer to take her out for supper and the romance bloomed. They got married Dec. 24, 2012.
"We had so many things in common - she liked fishing and crabbing, which I do all the time, and we just hit it off," said Nelson, 71. "We'll be able to do carpet bowling together as long as we can still stand up and throw it."
Cindy, who will celebrate her 60th birthday next Thursday, lived in Prince George for 24 years before she returned to her Vancouver Island roots in Duncan nine years ago. She was already an avid lawn bowler when she started carpet bowling seven years ago but was two years too young to enter the seniors (55-and-older) tournaments.
Nelson has become a carpet bowling diehard and plays it year-round, while Cindy prefers the outdoor settings of lawn bowling. Both are good at what they do on the carpet. The Shillitos won silver as a pairs team at the B.C. Seniors Games last year and are going for gold at this year's Seniors Games in North Vancouver.
"I like it because everybody has so much fun," said Nelson. "People bowl differently. You can't really read everybody's mind because they do different things compared to what you do. You follow a certain line and they come down a different way and get the same results as you do."
The object of the game is for each team to get as many bowls closest to the jack, a small white ball that is rolled out at the beginning of each end to determine how deep it will be placed on the centre of the carpet to act as the target.
Each bowl is oblong-shaped and is weighted unequally at the core to make it easier to curl around a guard while trying for the jack.
With the Shillitos both unleashing bowls at left-handed angles ahead in the shooting order of their right-handed skip, Cindy admits that made Knight's job more difficult to target the jack with his three shots in the eight-end game.
Despite that disadvantage Chemainus still made it to the podium, finishing third out of eight teams in the threes event. The team from Houston (Hermann Saefkow, Bob Morgan, Marilyn Carson) won it, and Kamloops (Marie Lewis, Inez Beaton and Betty Smedley) took second place.
Port Alberni (Joyce and Fred Luecke) won the pairs event and the fours title went to Barriere (Ernie Yungen, Hector Denton, Louis Zijdeveld and Anke Zijdeveld).
This was the fourth straight year the provincial tournament was held at the Hart Pioneer Centre. The hall is a perfect size to set up eight carpets under one roof and the city does it right when it hosts the event, which is why the provincial membership picked P.G. to host the event four years running.
Cindy Shillito sees potential for carpet bowling to expand its horizons and would like it to include more of the younger crowd.
"We need to get more young people involved in carpet bowling," said Cindy.
"We have a juniors league (in Duncan) and they just love it. Everybody says it's an old person's sport, we should actually have a competition for young people. That's what I'm going to suggest down in Duncan."
Carpet bowling seems like it would be an ideal game for kids. The bowls are relatively small (like five-pin bowling balls), and fit well in tiny hands. The length of the carpet is only 30 feet (nine metres), so it's easy to roll a bowl to where the jack is located. And, unlike Skittles, the popular indoor bowling kids game, there's no time wasted setting up all those darned hollow plastic pins.
Maureen Braun loves it when her grandchildren join her in a game of carpet bowling at the Moose Lodge on Douglas Street.
"I've been doing this for 10 years," said the 76-year-old Braun, who is also active with her husband Elmer in competitive horseshoe pitching. "This is kind of like lawn bowling, and I do that too."
The 80 bowlers involved in the four-day provincial tournament ranged in age from 59-85. When they weren't getting down to business concentrating on their shots they looked to be having the times of their lives.
"I love it, it's fun being out with the people - it beats staying home and cleaning," laughed Barbara Carson, who combined with her Prince George Moose Lodge teammates Wilma Couiyk, Audrey Ebert and Marilynn Goetjen to place third in the fours tournament.
"I told my son, at this point in my life if it's not fun I'm not going to be doing it anymore. So I sold my vacuum cleaner."
Carson knows a few people who are well into their 90s who are avid carpet bowlers at the Brunswick Seniors Centre at 10th Avenue and Brunswick Street.
"It's just something that it doesn't matter how old you are, you can do it and have fun," she said. "At our age what else do we want to do?"
