The dynamic Chemainus duo of Rick and Leonette Gibbons won this year’s 50 Ways To Love Your Puzzles music trivia tournament conducted over email.
The Georgina Falt Memorial Tournament is a fundraiser for the Alzheimer Society of BC and normally held in person with teams of eight, but has resorted to email to keep going during COVID the last two years with teams of two instead.
The Gibbons had their names added to the prestigious list of champions since the event debuted in 2013, but got their names engraved in larger letters than usual with the size of the teams reduced.
They normally play on a team with the Irvings, Arnolds and Val Verkaik. Even though they all still got together to work on the tournament puzzles, each had to submit their own separate entries.
“We always have fun when we get together,” said Rick.
“I think our team was shocked,” he added of their victory.
“I haven’t won anything for a long, long time so it’s wonderful,” noted Leonette.
Leonette is well-known for her many years within the Chemainus Elementary School community and both her and Rick are like pioneers of Chemainus they’ve been around so long.
Their knowledge of music trivia is also vast and they put it to good use in this tournament. They had perfect scores on four of the five rounds that included identifying car-tunes by Rob Kernachan, and solving weird song mash-ups, scrambles and Wheel of Fortune type puzzles.
That left the round where they had to match host Don Bodger with the best possible answers to identify certain songs in a Match Game style format.
“It was luck on matching, said Leonette.
The game was a bit more time-consuming to solve all the puzzles, but “it’s always a lot of fun,” Leonette enthused. “It’s all charity. It’s wonderful.”
All going well, they’ll be back on their eight-member team next year to see if their winning ways can rub off on their teammates against a talented field of regulars from all over the Island.
The best possible score in this year’s event was 280 in the first round and 200 in each of the last four for a total of 1,080. The Gibbons tallied 1,005.
They were closely followed by defending champions Rory Guenard and John Drope of Nanaimo at 980 and then Carol Bayley and Steve Johnson of Victoria along with Shelby and Andy Buchan of Duncan at 975, Deanna Schmidt and Cathy Shoemaker of Duncan at 965 and then three teams at 960 – Duncan’s Sue McKay and Wendy Nelson, Bert’s Boys (John and Herb Morgan) of Nanaimo and Dee Gallant, another Chemainus resident, and Anna Hargreaves, as there was only a small margin in the scores right down to 20th place.
