Ivory’s Adventures in Canada: 5 pin bowling

In early fall, I took an unusual sort of trip for me, a straight up vacation.  No conference, no coffee meetings, just a visit to my friend Jack.  We had a lot of fabulous adventures full of many, many new-to-me things.  Canadians sure do things goofy!

 

One of those goofy adventures was 5 pin bowling.  I’ve done plenty of bowling.  Heck, I even have a bowling skirt.  But, I’d never done 5 pin bowling before.  The pins are the same, except it’s only the front ones.  The balls are different.  They’re about the size of a softball and rather light compared to a full size bowling ball.  There’s less pin action because the pins are on strings, like puppets, for resetting.

The play and scoring are a little different, too.  You get 3 chances instead of 2 and pins are worth different points depending on where they are.  The head pin is 5, the next two out are 3 and the end two are 2 each.  There’s still strikes and spares and they work essentially the same.  There’s no bonus for taking 3 balls to knock down all the pins.  The max score per frame is 30.  I have no idea what a decent game score is.  All I know is, I beat Jack both games.  Hee hee.

My first couple rolls were terrible because I tried rolling the mini ball like I do my regular ball, straight down the lane.  That didn’t work because that roll relies on the size of the ball and closeness of the pins to knock things into other things.  Then I tried throwing it with a hook using the movements Mr. Trizzle had taught me for a curve roll.  It worked beautifully.

It was a lot of fun.  I kinda wish we had 5 pin bowling down here.

5 pin bowling in action