"The Old Sea Dog at the Anchor"

Our story begins this year as told by the son of the landlord of the Anchor hotel in Kipford, the year of grace 2004.

"I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his golf-bag following behind him in a hand-barrow; a short, strong, heavy, nut brown man; his tarry pigtail, falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white, under an ever twitching eye. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards;

Fifteen men on a dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seamed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of a stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared called roughly for a glass of rum and a spot of lunch, muttering all the time about the landlord of the pub along the road who had shut his galley at five minutes past the hour and had refused to serve him any food. 'By the way' he had said 'That's well out of order, I'll be writing to the Scottish Tourist Board' said he, adding "This man's driven all the way from Brechin!" re-enacting the scene in his mind, pointing to the salty old sea dog standing beside him (Sparks)

This (the rum) when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our sign-board.

And so Billy (Bones) Wilson arrived at the start of the 2004 Dudley Open, Kippford.

Ok, so we didn't set sail on the Hispaniola in search of treasure island, but we did manage to uncover Scotland's hidden treasures in some of Dumfries and Galloway's finest golf courses, and a few of us spent a fair bit of time digging in sand.