Nutley 3/30

For some really odd reason my retail job gave me a Wednesday night off. With Crown coming up I decided that I should go to Nutley.

I am not crown ready.

Oh, I fought well enough, and I had fun, and I had good endurance, but I am not there yet.

I fought Jabril, Jan, Darius, John the Breeder, and one of Gregor's fighters, (forget his name). Anybody else? I'm not sure.

Fighting with Jabril I did well. His A-Frame defense was tough to crack, but i took his leg a few times and killed him with both thrusts and fore edge.

Gregor's man creamed my leg once, but I had good fights with him and won most of them.

Fighting Darius was the main reason I showed up. We had a couple of decent fights in which, while I didn't kill him he had trouble killing me. Gave me a good workout for my defense. But in our second or third fight my shield strap broke. Not wanting to quit I went and grabbed another broadsword and fought him two-stick. I'm a bit out of practice, but my defense was solid and he was not able to kill me easily, but part of that is because he worries about the left-hand attack from a two-sword fighter. When I fight two-sword, because I don't practice it a lot, I am something of a chameleon. There are two main florentine styles in the SCA, Bellatrix and Milwauki, but within those there are variations, so against Darius I fought classic Bellatrix, Classic Milwauki, Alfred's style, Bodwahn's, Radnor's, Balin's, and my normal broadsword/short sword stance. I basically know one or two techniques out of each stance/style and after trying them out I'd move on to another to see what I could do with that. Not the most effective way to fight against the top Duke in the kingdom. Anyway, he took my leg twice, killed me thrusts while standing twice and with the edge two or three more times. The one time I killed him was when he took my left arm and decided to be nice to me by giving up his shield. That's a game in which I am much closer to being matched with Darius. After doing a similar thing, going through various techniques of single sword--Radnor's, Brian's, some silver and the Fiore technique, I finally killed him with a technique I more or less developed myself: from a high guard strike at his sword with an onside, step in with a parry six, block if he attacks (he did) pass left and cut to his shoulder. Worked like a charm.

My fights with Jan were great. I think I beat him more than he beat me. We might ahve traded evenly. My best kill on him was using the off-side cut/face thrust. I had noticed that he was moving to his right about 80% of the time, so I threw that little cut that just lands on the top of his shield and then thrust to where I knew he would be moving to, and hit him square in the face.

John the Breeder kicked my ass. There is no other way to put it. He is good--a lefty with a great big kite shield strapped like Lucan's (which, like a center grip, gives him a big blocking advantage for offside attacks). He's fast and strong and very aggressive, and eh practices three times a week. He killed me five or six times, I killed him twice--once with an edge cut, once with a body thrust. He had fixed the problem I'd identified on him at Iron Bog three weeks ago. My big problem was that I had no idea yet how to block lefies with that rather oddly strapped heater. It didn't swing all the way over like a center grip, if I just moved it around it was too close to my body. If I fought like Gui in the cross block stance it was too awkward.I finally had success cocking the point out to my open side and maintaining distance. We'll see how it plays if I fight Gui this weekend (he will be happy I've gone back to the heater, the center-grip was frustrating him).

So it was a good tough practice and I got really banged up. it was mostly my legs that got smashed and that was mostly from Darius when I was fighting two sword and from John, although Gregor's man hit my leg hardest of all. It was good to get more helmet time and recall what it feels like once again to get hit hard. :-)