What the heck are
they doing with those brushes? And why are they doing it? Vigorous sweeping,
quickly and with pressure, tends to melt the surface of the pebble just
a tiny bit. You can't see it, but it's there. This tiny sheen of water
on the tops of the pebbles has has two purposes:
a) to make a delivered
stone travel farther, and
b) to straighten
out the curve of a delivered stone.
A third and unofficial reason to
sweep is to keep warm! You will also see sweepers brushing lightly in front
of the moving stone to "clean" the ice. This tends to eliminate
sweater fuzz, pocket lint, dust, dirt from somebody's shoe, etc. that may
affect the path of the stone.
When can you sweep? That
question has two answers, depending on who's thrown the stone. If it is
your team that threw the stone, then anyone
and everyone on your team can sweep from tee line to tee line. Normally that's
the two sweepers, and sometimes the skip will come out from the house and
help. The person throwing the stone can even stand up, hustle down the
ice, and sweep their own stone! That's unusual, but perfectly acceptable.
It should be noted that adding a third or even a forth sweeper to the usual
two has very little additional effect. Once the stone has traveled past
the tee line, one person and only one person on your team (usually the
skip) can continue to sweep past the tee line.
Your
opponents can sweep your stone once it's past the tee line. This would
be an effort to sweep it out of the back of the house and out of play.
Only the person in charge of the house (skip or vice-skip) is allowed to
do that sweeping! If your opponent skip is busy sweeping your stone, then
that means they can't be sweeping their own stones since only one person
per team is allowed to sweep past the tee line. It is legal for both skips
to sweep the same stone, however one of them is probably making a strategic
mistake. Who has the "right of way"? Good question. Courtesy
dictates that one person does not interfere with another, but the details...
beats me!
What do you do about
burned rocks?
Burning a rock means you touched it, either with your broom, or your foot,
or your tripped and fell on it or something like that which could affect
the direction of travel. A rock burned (touched) before the far hog line
is immediately pulled from play. For rocks burned beyond the far hog line,
all stones are allowed to come to rest after which the non offending
team has the option to:
1. Remove the touched stone and replace
all stones that were displaced after the
infraction to their original position; or
2. Leave all stones where they came to
rest; or
3. Place all stones where it reasonably
considers the stones would have come
to rest had the moving stone not been touched.
