The Christmas Party season began with 17 tables at Thames's event on Sunday the 13th. This is set to be followed in succeeding weeks, like a troup of parading elephants, by similar seasonal festivities at Te Awamutu, Waikato, Rotorua, and Huntly.

Barry & JennyThe big event of the week - in case you missed it - was the Babich NZ-Wide Pairs which was won by Barry Jones & Jenny Millington of "our" Hamilton club. In 4th place nation-wide were Tony Hacking & Pat Rutherford of Tauranga while Neil Dravitzky & Paul Cosgrove of Rotorua scooped up the last Regional A point in finishing 16th. The event occupied 998 pairs in 59 clubs around the country last Friday night. This mammoth turn-out was scored using Bob Fearn's Compass scoring operated by Bob in Seattle and half your regional committee (by coincidence) in Cambridge. Jan, Anna, and Michael sat up for a couple of hours after play to do this job. Next year we've worked out that we can do it split over three countries as Jan will be sunning himself in Rarotonga about then - though probably not at midnight.

The Hamilton club's mini-congress was run over Labour weekend with players travelling from all over the country. Good attendances of 19 tables in the Pairs on Saturday, 22 teams on Sunday and 15 tables for Monday's consolation Swiss Pairs played while the top eight teams thrashed out the final and plate in the O'Neil room. Winners are listed on the site with full detail in the Results pages.

Having recently been elected to the Waikato Bays Regional Committee, I would like to let the clubs know that I am your club representative on the committee.

I am available to visit all clubs in the area and would suggest any of the following:

• attending the AGM
• attending a committee meeting
• playing on a club night

I would be prepared to speak and discuss with members the programmes the Waikato Bays Regional Committee have to assist clubs and their members.

Some of the programmes I would like to make clubs aware of include:

The National Congress is raging on in Hamilton as we speak: many of our clubs are represented in this the most prestigious event of the bridging year. One combination that is surely unique would be that of N Russell Thomson of the Waitomo club parterned by his son Hone of Huntly.
Russell and Hone Thomson
Hone has just completed Jane Stearn's NZB-based course of lessons for beginners at Huntly while Russell is one of just a handful that have attended every Congress since this event's inception in 1985.

Speaking of Huntly: the members experienced a couple of other life-changing events last week. They successfully completed their first night of Teams scored on their new Bridgemates AND they started to make use of the free results service offered to clubs in Waikato-Bays Region that do not have their own very flash web-publishing-with-full-drill-down-capability facility.

Whipping around the Region's websites (so easily accessible from our Home page here) we see that Cambridge is celebrating a National title - the first in 30years by one of its members. We checked whether Bruce and Merle Marr might not have achieved the like and Bruce informed us that he was a member of the combination that won the New Zealand Teams in 1985. They, too, have been regular attendees at all 31 Congresses even though they have lived in Australia these many years.

Oh man! - you gotta see this!!. Teams - Te Aroha STYLE!

Tauranga follows the fortunes of Sam and Jo Simpson who finished a most creditable fifth place in the New Zealand Pairs final. They made it through to the semi-final of the NZ Rubber, too, but fell at this penultimate fence. That was surely a LOT of bridge!