Cloverdale Trial

Today was our first trial for at least four weeks – it feels like it’s been months since the last one!! When it was in fact the Nationals in Sydney. Today we had a mixed bag of results. We were at Cloverdale Canine Companions club trial. Raven and I just couldn’t get in sync with each other today – we had the first two runs where my handling was fine and she was feral and then the last two runs when she had finally settled down and was listening/responding very well and I stuffed up. *sigh*. Oh well, least Cypher didn’t disgrace himself *vbg* Out of two runs he ended up with a 3rd place clear round in JDX – the Excellent Agility run we had a bit of bad handling by me (gave him no warning that the jump he was about to take was a spread rather than just a single) a bit of bad handling by him (he hit the weavers so fast his back end got caught up and he missed one). All in all I was pretty happy with him – he was keen and focused and ran on well. Raven’s first run was Masters Agility (which only had 1 qualifier) and we stopped at jump #8 as she took the bar down. Next was Open Agility and she was completely feral this time – she hit a bar (only the 2nd obstacle in!) and was half way up the dogwalk before I could stop her and she blew me off on her contact, I made her come back and do it properly – she got the seesaw nicely after that and then we had real issues with her layering out to a tyre. In the end I ran round the dogwalk and helped her out. Once we got to the distance line we were fine and she finished off nicely but she really wasn’t connected at all during that run. Then it was Masters Jumping and this was going really well until I moved too far down into a pocket that I should have held back on more and she took an off course jump. But other than that she listened really well and kept her bars up nicely. Then Open Jumping and idiot me completely forgot about the distance line ARGH!!! She did everything perfect and I of course stuffed it for her…never mind she still got lots of yummy treats afterwards. So today wasn’t a complete write off – we got a leg we needed and out of 6 runs we had four good ones.
Can’t wait till next weekend – three trials YAY!!