Saturday January 13th 2007 - Fun match at Red Gate

(Backfilled in October 2009 due to impending closure of Geocities)

Today was our first Red Gate fun match, and the runs were standard and gambler's (jumps at 16" for the first run, 22" for the rest). I was very pleased with Walter's performance today considering our almost total lack of practice recently. For the standard, we did the starter's only since I wasn't up to memorizing multiple courses. He did a good job with 2o2o on the contacts except he tended to sniff the ground for crumbs instead of coming when I released him. For the weaves, the course provided a nice easy straight line into them with me on the left side, and I'm really happy that he got the entry both times (I had had visions of him repeatedly bypassing the first 3 or 4 poles), but he tended to pop out at the 10th pole. Understandable I suppose since he's had hardly any practice on more than 6 weaves in the last few months (or ever, come to think of it). There was no table, so nothing to report there. For gambler's, we just played around with the two starter's gambles and I'm happy to report that although not every attempt was successful, he did do both of them successfully several times (both were tunnel/jump combinations). At the start of the fourth and final run I decided to try recalling him through the weaves just for the fun of it but that was just not happening; he totally bypassed them and ran straight to me instead. So I didn't push it and instead we went on to do some more gambles. He did knock a couple of bars over the course of the day. Rear crosses over jumps were spin-free, yay! Of note, he displayed neither the tunnel hesitation nor the dogwalk hesitation that he had developed towards the end of our last agility class session. In summary, it was a fun day and I gave him several play breaks during the runs so I hope he'll fall asleep tonight thinking about the fun time he had today.