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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set and the national flag of Australia, the country of Gladstone, Australia, composed into a single image.
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Auckland Hill Lookout in Gladstone, Australia. A hilltop lookout above Gladstone with free mounted telescopes and map boards, looking out over the harbour, the port berths and the islands of Port Curtis beyond.
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Gladstone Tondoon Botanic Gardens in Gladstone, Australia. An 83-hectare botanic garden on the edge of Gladstone planted with Port Curtis region and tropical north Queensland species, paths and lawns around Lake Tondoon at its centre.
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Curtis Island in Gladstone, Australia. A long low island across the water from Gladstone with three large LNG plants and their tanks and flare stacks on the near shore, mangroves and bush running along the rest of the coast.
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Lake Awoonga in Gladstone, Australia. A large freshwater lake behind a rockfill dam wall on the Boyne River south of Gladstone, timbered hills around the shoreline and boat ramps and picnic areas along the near bank.
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set and the national flag of Australia, the country of Gladstone, Australia, composed into a single image.

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set

Gladstone, Australia  ·  Strings > 16L

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set

This Japanese co-poly keeps the tempo of a well-ruled ledger — slides, snaps back, spins, and holds its tension to the last entry. There is a word to be had about the per-set arithmetic, but it comes second. Gladstone first, receipts included, four stops and nothing padded.

↓   Tour Gladstone, Australia

Four stops before the checkout

Gladstone, Australia
01
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Auckland Hill Lookout in Gladstone, Australia. A hilltop lookout above Gladstone with free mounted telescopes and map boards, looking out over the harbour, the port berths and the islands of Port Curtis beyond.
Stop one

Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set: A gallery in a converted town hall. Half the country has one of those and most of them have better light. Designed by the architect Roy Chipps and built from 1933 to 1934 by relief workers during the Depression, it was the seat of local government for half a century before the council converted it, and the gallery and museum opened officially on 3 April 1985. Fine. Then you reach the purpose-built glass bridge walkway between the buildings, and standing inside it is a nineteenth-century marble statue of William Ewart Gladstone, the British statesman the town is named after. A statue. In a bridge. I have not seen that anywhere else, and I have looked. Queensland Heritage Register, and fairly.

02
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Gladstone Tondoon Botanic Gardens in Gladstone, Australia. An 83-hectare botanic garden on the edge of Gladstone planted with Port Curtis region and tropical north Queensland species, paths and lawns around Lake Tondoon at its centre.
Stop two

Gladstone Tondoon Botanic Gardens

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set: Eighty-three hectares, officially opened in 1988, and I arrived ready to be unimpressed, because every city has a botanic garden and most are the same imported showing-off. Not this one. The collections are devoted almost entirely to native flora, weighted to the plants of the Port Curtis region and tropical Queensland, in naturalistic plantings around Lake Tondoon. An arboretum, a herbarium and reference library, the Yujo Bonsai House and a Japanese tea garden from the sister-city ties to Japan, kilometres of trails through bushland alive with birds. Free to enter, and it hosts concerts, ceremonies and environmental education all year. That is the thing Gladstone does better than the towns that look down on it: it grew what actually belongs here.

03
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Curtis Island in Gladstone, Australia. A long low island across the water from Gladstone with three large LNG plants and their tanks and flare stacks on the near shore, mangroves and bush running along the rest of the coast.
Stop three

Auckland Point Lookout

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set: Every port town has a hill and every one of them claims the best view from it. This one rises above Auckland Inlet, where Gladstone's first wharves were built, and takes its name from the Lord Auckland, the ship that brought the settlement's first European colonists in 1847 during the short-lived attempt to found the colony of North Australia. And the panorama is the working city, honestly: Port Curtis sheltered by Curtis and Facing Islands, the wharves and conveyors that make this one of Australia's largest ports, the alumina refineries, the power station and the LNG plants on Curtis Island. Interpretive markers run the history from colonial anchorage to industrial powerhouse. Prettier views exist elsewhere. More honest ones do not.

04
advanced tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set photographed at Lake Awoonga in Gladstone, Australia. A large freshwater lake behind a rockfill dam wall on the Boyne River south of Gladstone, timbered hills around the shoreline and boat ramps and picnic areas along the near bank.
Stop four

East Shores Parklands

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set: Waterfront redevelopment. I have seen a hundred of them and ninety are a lawn and a coffee cart. This one was developed by the port authority on former industrial land beside Auckland Inlet and opened in stages from 2015: lawns, barbecue pavilions, a children's water park, playgrounds and boardwalks along the water's edge, with later stages adding recreation facilities and event spaces. Festivals, markets and community events year-round. And here is what the others get wrong — most towns hide the working port behind the park. Gladstone points straight at it, so you sit on the grass and watch ships move through one of the busiest ports in the country. Grudgingly: better.

The Gladstone, Australia track

Yonex Polytour Fire 16L Tennis String Set

Written for this world alone.

Let us go through this line by line, because a string set is a recurring cost and people forget that.

The item: Yonex Polytour Fire, 16L gauge, 1.25mm. Construction is a monofilament core finished with high polymer polyester — a co-polyester, in other words, made in Japan, which is worth noting because it is part of what you are paying for.

The technology you are actually buying is SIF: Silicone Oil Infused Filament. In plain terms it is a manufacturing process that lowers friction across the stringbed so the strings slide and then snap back hard, and snapback is where spin comes from. There is an HR elastomer in there as well.

This is a firm string that gives you control, spin and durability, and it is aimed at medium-to-fast swing speeds — buy it for a slow swing and you have bought the wrong item.

The set is 39 ft / 12 m, one frame. If you are going through more than four or five sets a year, stop and do the arithmetic: the same string comes on a 660 ft / 200 m reel and the per-frame cost drops through the floor. This one is black; it is also sold in red.

Which brings us to Gladstone, a town that has been costing out large projects since Matthew Flinders charted the harbour in 1802 and has, on the whole, done rather well out of it.

The climate here runs everywhere from a mild dry winter morning to a February afternoon at thirty-two degrees with the humidity off the harbour, and this string holds its tension through both, which is the only reason I am prepared to enter it in the annual column.

It is also perfect for the hard courts out at Tondoon, where the surface is abrasive and a softer string would be a monthly expense rather than a seasonal one.

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