Members of the Club attended the annual Alliance Francaise Petanque tournament at Rick and Catherine Steele's beautiful property in Ballarat in March.  We were successful bringing in first and second places amongst 14 teams!

We had three teams at Avoca Doubles this year - Jeff and Michel, Jack and Gordon and Clive and John.  In addition Chris and Rob played with other Club members.  All teams performed competitively amongst the 30 teams in the Open competition.

Jeff and Michel did well on the second day coming in fourth in the Complementaire section.  Some photos below - including some from the recent outing at Gordon's G-dome (since we forgot to take enough photos at Avoca!)

A group of 18 members and partners travelled to Blue Pyrenees Winery on Friday March 8th.  We played some petanque on the famous piste that the legendary finals of the Avoca tournaments i the 70s were played on.  They are now more a dirt road so the terrain was "challenging"!  A great day out culminated by a four or five tapas course lunch that was yummy.

We took three teams to the annual Apollo Bay tournament - Big Dave, Graeme and Jeff who won 4 out of six on Saturday and came equal fifth in the Principale on Sunday.  Jacques (Jack), Gordon and Rob won two on Saturday and performed well in the Sociale on Sunday. Michel, John and Clive won one on Saturday but ended up fourth in the Sociale on Sunday. .  A good weekend.

Many thanks to Gordon and Pam for hosting a very pleasant afternoon/evening at their place where a few exciting social games of Petanque were played and a great meal was shared.  Great to see some new faces there too.

A very successful event was held on Saturday Oct 6th with a record 25 teams participating.

The winners were the trio from St Kilda Club - Alexis Susser, Vikash Jaunky, Christophe Moretti in a close final against Jean Francois Veyssiere, Nicolas Demunck and Stephane Langlois also from St Kilda.

Special thanks to our major sponsor PRD Real Estate and to the numerous local businesses that donated goods for the Raffle (Thanks Gordon for all that work.)

​A great day.

Instigated by Clive last year our bi-annual awards night celebrates the "best" player over the past 6 months.  The inaugural winner was Michel.

This year the event was held at Gordon and Pam's place.  A very convivial evening was had with the Awards ceremony conducted excellently by Gordon with assistance from Clive.

The winner?  New member Phil McGrath!

Smythesdale had a team at the recent North West Cup at Halls Gap on April 22nd.  We did reasonable well with 7th placing out of 12 teams.

We had three teams at the annual Avoca Doubles - Jeff and Clive, Chris and John and the Daves.  The Daves ended up third in the Consulante.  The other two teams did pretty well in the Sociale.  Some photos.

We had eight players at the annual Apollo Bay tournament in February.  The Daves and Jeff missed out on the Final by 1 mm!  Ask them to explain!