The Rarotonga Open Golf Tournament, sponsored by Scotty Bower Pro Shop in Whitford, New Zealand, starts this week and there is growing interest and enthusiasm from golfers, not just from Rarotonga but also from Aitutaki, as well as New Zealand-based players.

The tournament, to be played over 54 holes, starts on Thursday and finishes on Saturday.

Dinner will be served to all participants on Thursday and Saturday.

The sweep competition for Thursday will be on stableford, on Friday it will be on bogey and for Saturday it will be on nett.

The sweep prize-giving for all three days will be held on Saturday as well as the main prize-giving and all members are asked to make every effort to attend.

There literally is thousands of dollars in prizes to be won so this one is definitely worth trying for.

One thing that will definitely be different this week and from now on is that players must not tee off before the official starting time.

Over the last couple of weeks there have been groups of players staring before the first tee off time and this has meant that the green keeper’s staff are being interrupted while trying to mow the greens. Remember that the daylight starts later at this time of year and the staff cannot be expected to start in the dark. If you tee off too early you will leave yourself open to disqualification.

Last Saturday was a Club Sweep day in a stableford competition and produced another set of close results with only 3 points covering the top ten winners.

Vae Unuka and Memory Akama were the best with 43 points each with Bernie Raffe close behind on 42 points.

The previous week was the handicapper’s tournament during which 5 stableford points covered the top ten.

For a while it looked like Tere Okirua, the winner of last year’s tournament, was going to repeat history with 44 points.

However, one of the last players of the day, Tuaine Marsters, coming back into form after a few weeks of higher scores (stroke-wise), finished with a 75 off the stick.

This gave Tuaine 45 points and she was the winner of a brand new barbecue. Tuaine reckons she hasn’t used it yet because it looks too nice to get dirty!

Tania Karati was 3rd with 43 points followed by Steve Simpson (42) Rita Howard (42), Frank Berg (41), Kurai Foster (41), Apai Paitai (41), Mena Howard (41) and Moetu Tangitamaiti (41).

The senior players were a little off form on the day with the men’s best round coming from Ned Howard and Sonny Karati who both carded a 74 off the stick.

Anthony (Ants) Turua thought he had a bad day at golf until he won the lucky draw of a portable DVD player.

It’s time for the Lionel/Virginia competition to start again. This very popular and very hard to win competition will start next week and run for several months in order to give players plenty of time to arrange their matches.

Good luck to all golfers and many thanks to Scotty Bower.