YAY AGILITY IS BACK!

The 2007 season has begun and we're back from our first trial, not really a full trial – Strategic Pairs was on offer plus a fun teams event. Raven wasn’t too feral for Excellent Pairs and she and Nifty did a pretty smooth run to win 1st place and gain their second legs of SPDX. It was great to be running agility again, it was an absolute joy to have the Raven back to full form. Cypher and Sage also did a tidy run to qualify for their second pass. The boy enjoyed himself I think. I ran two other dogs for other people and they also qualified as well, Emmy the GSP in Excellent and Rumour the Sheltie in Novice.

In the teams I don’t how we did because I don’t have the full results, we were sitting quite nicely after the 1st round with three dogs posting clear times (Tag, Rumour and Cypher) and Raven posting the fastest time but with one bar down. 2nd round Rumour found her 5th gear all of a sudden and next thing I knew we posted three DQs all one after the other when she felt sure she knew the course and I didn’t, oh well she was happy and putting the speed on so I was happy. Cypher was going quite well till he turned right instead of left (as I was turning) and thought the tunnel was a definite next obstacle, he checked in with me just a little too late to stop his momentum and he picked up a DQ for a wrong course as half his body disappeared inside the tunnel. Raven’s run was not quite as smooth as the first one and again we had a bar down, the spread this time and both bars of it as there was some miscommunication happening as she flew over it. I said “Come” she kind of went “Wha…?” and then splat went the bars. Other than that it was pretty quick. All in all pretty happy with my two, Raven’s absolutely glad to be back competing I think, she was pretty psyched up. She did some awesome running contacts tonight and tried hard to do the right thing. We still need some bar work during the week though. Cypher will focus mostly on his obedience I think, and in agility we might practice having his lead right in the middle of a sequence as in the second round tonight when we did some obstacles that led us back near the gate he started to look around to see if he could see his lead. He’s really got to learn that this lead tug fun is only on my terms when I say we can play. He’s pretty quick and I think he’ll figure this out soon.