Rivals just a stone's throw from world title

A TINY island off the west coast of Scotland will play host to the World Stone Skimming Championships tomorrow.

Contestants from as far away as Australia will travel to Easdale island in Argyll to crouch low and achieve the perfect skim in front of the island's 60 inhabitants.

Easdale, which looks out down the Firth of Lorne to Islay and Jura, has no cars and is just half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. It can be reached only by a 20ft passenger ferry from Seil Island, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge.

The island has emerged as an excellent spot for the championships because it is littered with a limitless supply of perfect skimmers - flat pieces of slate left over from the days when Easdale was an important mining area.

Tomorrow's contest takes place in a disused, water-filled, former slate quarry, which provides both perfectly calm water and a natural arena for the four judges and an audience that is encouraged to heckle. Contestants will try to beat the record of 55 metres, set in 1997.

"To be good, you need big shoulders, a good sense of balance and wee legs, because you have to crouch low," said one of the organisers, Fiona Blakey. "The secret is to make sure that the first skim occurs as far away as possible because the stone starts to lose momentum as soon as it hits the water."

Ms Blakey said that this year's championships were expected to be particularly hard-fought because the 1998 men's champion, Ian Shellcock, 36, came from south of the border. "The joke here," she said, "is that Ian's wrist action was obviously better because he is English."