By Maria Nilsson

ATMOSEA BOWLING

What does ten-pin bowling, surfing and Atmosea all have in common? …Next to nothing really…but when the girls are looking for a bit of fun, wearing their matching team jackets and the waves are flat…turns out it’s a pretty good time!

 On this particular waveless-Wednesday, the gurf-gang decided to switch it up a bit; we geared up for a night of laughs at the lanes. Strolling into the abandoned club, we were nearly too keen to get fit for our almost-trendy-but-not-quite-yet bowling shoes. Now looking the part, somewhere inside of us all the inner Goddesses with bowling super powers began to emerge.

 Game faces on, we lined up for the BEST GAME OF BOWLING EVER. After a few gutter-balls, we laughed as we all reminisced that most of us hadn’t bowled for at least ten years. Maria however, on her first ball gets 9/10 pins down!

“HOLE IN STRIKE!” she yelled, it sent the rest of us into belly-aching laughter, but like seasoned veterans in the sport, we explained that a “strike” (no hole necessary) is only when you get all ten pins down – we were laughing so hard cheap beer burst out our noses.

 Soon the rest of the lanes became completely full, we didn’t know that the professional bowling league also practices on Wednesday nights…These people were serious. Suddenly balls are barrelling towards the pins at a lightning speed, the players all had on special gloves and strikes are going off like thunder-claps all around us!

 The staff were ever so patient with us as we broke nearly every rule and likely annoyed the rest of the serious bowlers with our cheering and victory dances.

 Trying to watch and learn as much as we could by our neighbouring pros, we played game after game. We were fuelled by lots of laughter and smiles, but mostly by lollies, cheap beer, hot-dogs and chips with flavours you wouldn’t even imagine existed.

 The Thunder-claps of strikes kept bellowing around us, and even though half our balls ended up in the gutters, in our matching pink jackets the team spirit was uplifting.

Have you ever heard the expression “the best surfer in the water is the one who is having the most fun”?  Well, if you apply this to bowling, maybe we weren’t so bad. The pros might have had us on the skill but we certainly took the prize for best-dressed, scream-laughter and victory dances!  

Words by Jess Flynn

Photos by Alex T Roberts

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