Koe's puking over, Alberta starts winning.

Once the puking stopped, Kevin Koe's curling touch returned. 

In what was probably the story of the opening weekend of the Tim Hortons Brier, the Alberta powerhouse, the team that Koe created after jumping ship from his defending champions, was not winning. In fact, the rink started 0-2 and looked mediocre at best.

So what was the problem? It appears the skipper was dealing with a case of the bad tank, possibly food poisoning, that had him upchucking between ends in his first game. But according to George Johnson of the Calgary Herald, he recovered in time to get Alberta into the win column.

Kevin Koe’s back to fighting trim, fully over a bout of flu/food poisoning that had left him occasionally emptying the house during the curtain-raising 8-7 extra end loss to B.C.’s Jim Cotter on Saturday night. 

Team Alberta’s position was as unsettled as its skip’s tummy had been heading to the evening draw Sunday. But staring down the barrel of potentially ruinous 0-3 start, Koe recaptured his championship form, finishing at a that’s-more-like-it 93 per cent, and the hosts posted their first win, a must-have, 7-3 triumph in nine ends over the youthful Mark Kean rink from Ontario during Sunday’s 6:30 draw.

Marc Kennedy said the barfing skip was at the point where they had to look at Plan B/

“Oh yeah, there was some puking going on between ends,’’ revealed third Marc Kennedy. “We had discussed him not even playing, what our backup plan was. We left the option up to him, whether to play. And he did. But how do you compete against some of these skips when you’ve got wobbly legs.