The Sunday After...

Monday 24th October 2005

Well Raven brought me back down to earth with a thud at yesterday’s very small trial (100 entries over in 2 hours!!) up at Carine in the afternoon. She kept her insanity under wraps right up until she crossed the start line of her first run in Open Agility. It was a straight run of 3 jumps and you then had to pull them through for a threadle. She decided to keep going after jump 3 despite the very firm verbal to “Come” and nearly caused us an off course. Then she decided to finish it off – she did the threadle jump and went straight in the wrong end of the tunnel – so after that it was “you are going to give me 2 0n 20ff girl!” on all the contacts – needless to say she did every contact at a flying run and did the next couple of obstacles while I was still standing by the contact waiting for her 2o2o position – she did a nice handstand on the table so she didn’t fall off at least but she seriously shouldn’t have been going that fast off a seesaw anyway! She popped the weavers despite me facing her and giving her the strong command to weave at the end (I had noticed several dogs had popped the weavers and made sure I was very clear about her doing all the weaves but she still popped them to go to the tunnel – cow!). So needless to say I called her back to redo the seesaw and redo the A Frame and made her wait. It wasn’t a pretty run by any stretch of the imagination and she was quite aware of my displeasure with her LOL!! Thankfully by the time we got in the Master Agility ring she had reigned in some of her insanity and gave me a beautiful run with a completely running contact on the dog walk which the judge called us for unluckily – I had a look on the video someone took and it was quite clear that she got it there. Never mind eventually our judges will get round to appreciating running contacts. I was happy with her run. Open Jumping we ran clear for 3rd place and Master jumping we knocked the 3rd bar and left the ring – so 2 out of 4 runs were pretty good. Just wondering if she is now in the mode of needs lots of runs to get any kind of sanity. We shall see at her next trial in a couple of weeks.
I took Cypher with me and in between runs and at the beginning and in the afternoon at the end and we practiced doing 12 weave poles in many different ways and he was fantastic, very enthusiastic and getting quicker all the time. Very pleased with his weave pole progress.