New Zealand representative Tony Coster celebrated Open-class shearing’s return to the Ellesmere A and P Show in Canterbury on Saturday with his fourth win in the event.
Having recovered from breaking a wrist at the end of a New Zealand team tour of the UK in July, and having been shearing Open-class for more than 20 seasons, Coster figured in the latest of numerous quinellas with fwllow Rakaia shearer and former New Zealand representative Grant Smith.
Coster had won the Ellesmere.title in 1998, 2008 and 2009, but there was no Open event last season when a rain-affected show clashed with the New Zealand Spring Shears in Waimate.
Fine weather prevailed this time, attracting about 9500 people to the show at Leeston, where both Coster and Smith had to produce the quality to overcome the time deficit to Ashburton shearer Rocky Bull, who shore the 8-sheep final in 9min 16sec.
Bull is one of a group of seven shearers getting together to mark the swansong of Rakaia judge and Master Shearer John Hough, who aims to contest 21 competitions in his “Last Stand” season, at the age of "not 70 yet."
While never reaching a Golden Shears Open final, he was accorded Master Shearer status in 1986 and featured in a World three-stand ewe-shearing record in 1989. He has been a New Zealand team manager and was a judge at the 2008 World Championships in Norway.
The chairman of Shearing Sports New Zealand’s South Island committee, he decided earlier this year that this season would be his last as an official, spurning the idea of having one last blow-out in competition.
“I was just going to do it by myself,” he said, but it soon attracted the attention of fellow seasoned South Island shearers Gavin Rowland (the chairman of Shearing Sports New Zealand), Tom Wilson (a Darfield-based Scotsman and 1984 World champion), contractor and show commentator Norm Harraway, Rocky Bull, Robert McLaren and John Fraser.
He’s shorn all three South Island competitions to date this season, at Alexandra, Waimate and on Saturday, and says all seven plan to travel north for the Golden Shears in March, and three competitions the previous weekend, and for the New Zealand championships in Te Kuiti, where they’ve booked a corporate table.
Two “cockies” are helping with petrol, and a wool company is providing the use of a van for the road trips, taking some of the worry off Hough who commented after the day at Leeston: “I didn’t go that well. I should be coming right by the end.”
Rare competitor Jock Barrett, currently based in Rakaia, won the Senior final, and Irish shearer Joseph Stephens backed-up from victory a week earlier at Waimate by winning the Intermediate final.
