The Ancient Art of Quoits

Deck quoits

Deck quoits is popular on cruise ships. The quoits are invariably made of rope, so as to avoid damaging the ship's deck, but there are no universally agreed standards or rules - partly because of the game's informal nature and partly because the game has to adapt to the shape and area of each particular ship it is played upon.
Players take it in turn to throw three or four hoops at a target which usually, though not always, consists of concentric circles marked on the deck. The centre point is called the jack. Occasionally this may take the form of a raised wooden peg, but more usually it is marked on the surface in the same way that the concentric circles are.
Well what happened was, Big Sean and I were persuaded by Malcolm (The Assasin) & Patrick (The Punisher) to try our arm at Quoits which we duly did with varying degrees of success, after nearly depositing several Quoits directly into the Ocean, taking chunks out of the ships superstructure we started to get the hang of the game and embarked on several amusing games, which to be honest were quite enjoyable. Half way through one game at quite a tense point in proceedings the Captain made his Churchillian style 6-00pm progress speech, causing the suspension of the game or quoitus interruptus. The game onboard ship is very popular with daily competitions taking place and the whole thing is taken very seriously and is extremely competitive, unlike our friendly games which had a never ending stream of banter, abuse and laughter, with even Georgie joining in (doing better in one session, than I did in several). Of course the best part of all was the apres quoits in Lords Taveners (The Pub) discussing the techinical aspects of the game over several beers before dinner, while Malcolm (The Duracell Bunny) went off on his training 2 mile walk around the deck, we were with him in spirit and waved at him every time he passed the bar window.