#curling rocks

[jenni-snake]

Canada vs. Sweden - 2:0. Ten minutes left in the game. I think I like curling better - when there's no hope left, you can just call it a day.

[newstfionline]

For Sale: Craggy Isle Where Olympic Rocks Are the Stars

By John F. Burns, NY Times, November 23, 2013

AILSA CRAIG, Scotland--This stunning volcanic island has been part of Scottish legend for a thousand years, its sugarloaf profile decorating Scottish bank notes and memorialized in a Keats sonnet.

It has no inhabitants, no electricity, no fresh water and no arable land--nothing of value, it would seem, but for this: For a century and more, its quarries have been the source of the distinctive, water-resistant microgranite used to make most of the world's curling stones. These include all those used in recent world championships and the Olympics, including the Sochi Games that begin in February.

But the modest income from the quarrying of the island's prized strains of blue hone and common green and a lease granted to Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has taxed the dwindling resources of its owner, the eighth Marquess of Ailsa, whose family has owned the island for 500 years.

Like many of Britain's old landowning families, the marquess's family has been through decades of retrenchment as a result of inheritance taxes. It lost the family seat, Culzean Castle, to the National Trust in 1945, and in 2010 the current marquess decided to part with Ailsa Craig, posting an initial price of $4 million. That figure was later cut to $2.4 million, and as the waters of the Firth of Clyde have lapped at Ailsa Craig's rocky shore each day, little has changed in the intervening years. The island remains misty, monumental and for sale.

When Keats first saw the island soaring 1,100 feet into the sky off Scotland's west coast in 1818, he repaired to a mainland inn and wrote a sonnet by candlelight describing it as a "craggy ocean-pyramid," summoned from the deep by some mythic power, and attended for eternity by eagles and whales. Nearly 200 years later, with Scotland approaching a referendum on independence from Britain next September, it remains an icon in the country's national consciousness, redolent of the rugged, stand-alone character many Scots pride as their birthright.

Earlier this month, approaching across 10 miles of shimmering open sea aboard his 35-foot lobster boat, the M.V. Glorious, the skipper, Mark McCrindle, broke the silence of his cramped wheelhouse to say that in 30 years of plying the waters from the nearby port of Girvan, he had rarely seen it looking more majestic. "Aye," he said, "she's a beauty." Would he like to own it? "Twenty thousand pounds is all I'd pay," he said, quickly adding, "What would I do with it?"

Finding a buyer will require more than the poetic flights of Keats, or "the dreams" the 57-year-old marquess says he would be selling to anyone whose fancy runs to an island that has no modern conveniences, no active forms of employment since the quarrying ended in 1969, and only one habitable structure among the rusting, roofless ruins of the quarters once used by men working in the lighthouse or the quarries.

Over the centuries, the island's 220 acres, much of it in the form of precipitous crags and thick uphill reaches of bracken, have provided Scots, and sometimes their enemies, with an ocean fortress. Barely three-quarters of a mile from tip to tip, the island has served as a redoubt for repelling Spanish invaders, a sanctuary for pirates and, for the last 25 years, a preservation area for tens of thousands of breeding seabirds, especially gannets and puffins.

So it is little surprise to find that property agents listing it reach for hyperbole in stating its attractions. "The only island to win a gold medal in the Olympic Games!" says Farhad Vladi of the Hamburg-based company Vladi Private Islands. He claims to have sold more than 2,000 islands across the globe, many of them in more enticing, or at least warmer, locations than the Firth of Clyde.

Vladi's medal reference referred to the curling stones used when Rhona Martin, the Scottish champion who threw what became known as the "stone of destiny" to win the women's gold medal at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City in 2002. The victory set off fireworks celebrations in Edinburgh and Glasgow; it was the first time Britain had won a winter gold in 18 years.

Scots, and others across Britain, are hoping for a repeat at the Sochi Olympics, and they look to Ailsa Craig, at least metaphorically, as a talisman. Two thousand tons of previously quarried granite was taken off the island this summer by landing craft and used for cutting, spinning and polishing into the Sochi stones at the factory at Mauchline, 25 miles away on the Ayrshire mainland, that has a contract for the Olympic stones.

A few of those stones will slip gently out of the sure hands of Britain's best medal hope, its world champion women's team and its 23-year-old skip, Eve Muirhead. The 44-pound, kettle-shaped rocks will be made, in the body, from the speckled Ailsa Craig granite known as common green, and will glide to the "house," or target, on a base ring of the island's inimitable blue hone, whose tight molecular structure makes it impenetrable to melting ice.

In the meantime, the marquess, who has lost a leg to diabetes, waits for an offer on what he calls his rock. During an encounter at his favorite pub, among a bustle of weather-beaten farmers and bushy-bearded seadogs at the old marketplace in Ayr, he spoke with scant sentiment about the prospect of giving up ownership of the island, which the listing agents say has failed to attract any serious interest.

"It's going to go out of the family," he said. "But I think of it this way: It's not going anywhere. It's always going to be there, and it really doesn't matter who owns it."

The same dispassion came when the talk turned to Ailsa Craig as a sporting icon. With one of the other titles he inherited, the marquess, as Lord Archibald Angus Charles Kennedy, head of the Clan Kennedy, has been a celebrated guest at highland games and other clan gatherings in Scotland and Ireland, and in the United States, Canada and other far-flung outposts. But his passions fall short of caber-tossing, shot-putting and, especially, curling.

With a smile and more than a hint of mischief, he summarized his attitude toward the sport that is said to have had its origins on Scotland's frozen ponds in the 16th century.

"It's the boringest game you can ever watch," he said.

[saxigenouscorviform]

I figure I'm just gonna reblog curling stuff till I go to sleep now.

[justeight]

Watching the Curling Nationals on TV with my Mom and Dad c: Commentary ranges from all the people there who know my dad (all of them, he's on the Board, he sets up all the draws, etc, but he likes pointing them all out) to all of us bickering about strategy, to which player's kids I nearly babysat. Already my dad and I are discussing the possibility of saving enough to go watch the Sochi Olympics xD Yeah Curling!