Minutes with George Ocean: Malaga. San Miguel, Volcanos, and Stark 92

Well as most of you probably already know, Spain was an absolute shit show. As much as I would like for them to change the location, I can say I wouldn't mind going back year after year regardless if we ever played paintball. Why do I say that? Well us Americans will make the best out of any opportunity and become good friends with San Miguel.....and that's exactly what we did.

Mykel and I arrived wednesday morning only to find out our Belgium teammates would be showing up 7 hours later than us. It's actually a really good thing since it means we can catch up on sleep while waiting for them to fly in. We had training schedule for the next day but that would all change once we showed up at the field.

Chocolate Waves

Snake side at Malaga

Trose Boat

So after seeing that, we quickly realized we weren't playing at all today. They reschedule practice and games all for the next day.

You're also probably wondering why the snake was in the sea too. What that also meant was the dorrito side was on the spectator side along with the pits. This made viewing games almost impossible as well. I have no idea what they were thinking when they set it up like that.

We arrived at the field the next day, only to find it in similar condition. This time they cleaned it up a bit and we got a few games in against Ryan Moorehead with Coming at Ya and Instinct. After about 45 minutes it started to pour on us so practice games were postponed for a bit. I'm glad we got the practice in because we quickly found out the snake side played very quick and you had to adjust almost instantaneously if you lost a body on that side. With this knowledge we went into our first match against Brussels Crossfire, another good team from Belgium.

This match would start off real rough for us because we were given a penalty I didn't even know existed. Our snake player recieved a 5 for 1 for "trying to wipe" a hit so the whole team was pulled plus we started the next game 4 on 5. What a swell way to start off the new year eh? We ended up battling back in a lot of close points to win 4-3. This was a really big win for us considering we've always had trouble battling from behind to win matches.

Our next match was against All Russians, a team that dominated D1 so well last year they didn't even lose a match. Not much to say about this match because it was over so quick. We won 4-0, I guess all you can say is welcome to the SPL :-)! All joking aside, this will be a VERY competitive team. They are in fact russian so they know how to practice and win so I don't see our next matchup going as smoothly as the first.

After our two matches the weather took a turn for the worse. The thunderstorms forecasted for the weekend rolled in and along with the sea devastated the fields again and would continue for the rest of the weekend. On top of all that, the EFkoaijdsfklasdfiasdlfasdlkdfjalsy glacier volcano erupted preventing teams from either coming if they booked late flights or returning home. This coupled with a French train driver strike forced most teams to either rent a car to drive home or wait it out in Malaga. We were lucky enough that Madrid still hadn't been closed so we made it back to USA safe and sound. I was unlucky enough to get food poisoning and through up most of the way back.

While we were stuck in Malage we decided to make the most of it. One of my most favorites things at these Euro-events is the US Fire sale. All us hired guns will set up in one location and try and push gear for any and all who want it. My part in the whole ordeal is to stand on top of a chair and yell at anyone who walks near. Besides that we partied til people looked at us funny and enjoy what time had left in Malaga. Our good friend San Migeul (the beer) and Pedro the donkey also made it easy on us too.

Pedro