All Dogs trial - Day 1

Yay, the September two-day trial at one of our favourite venues!

After hearing earlier this week about the tragic, sudden, and unexpected loss of a local agility competitor's wonderful dog who should have had many, many more years of life, the concept of really enjoying the day regardless of the q situation or other "problems" was fresh in mind.

Jumpers: One glitch where I inadvertently pulled him off a jump in anticipation of a sharp turn to the tunnel to the left. Otherwise a good run in typical Walter style.

Snooker: With Walter's weave-popping issues and the 12-weaves being almost always #7, Snooker for Walter and me is becoming a simple game of how-to-do-the-#6-three-times-for-the-Q. (Ok, to add some spice maybe I should try for four #6s sometime.) This was a nice course with the teeter as #6 and the obstacles were all spread out so not a lot of offcourse potential. Walter is really a great dog for Snooker (when he hasn't got it in mind to pay his dues to the zero points club) so he made my job easy and yes we got our Q, as unexciting as it must have been to watch. :-D Didn't bother asking him to do the weaves in the closing -- if he's only got a finite number of clean weaves in him I'd rather save them for Standard and Team!

Standard: I had signed him up for this in the hopes that it would be a cool or even better, downright COLD weekend so that Walter would have a chance of doing some clean weaves. Bummer, it was a nice hot day so no surprise, weave issues. But the saving grace is at least it wasn't our THIRD MS run botched only by botched weaves: he had pulled a strange manoeuvre earlier in the run by exiting the tunnel from the same end from whence he had entered.

Gamblers: This was a totally doable gamble for us (a couple of jumps and a tunnel to a laterally distant teeter followed by an out-over with two side by side jumps -- exactly the sort of thing we've been working on), and in fact he actually did complete the main gamble, but a bit of a glitch between the jumps and tunnel ate up some time so he was over time. One of the mini gambles was right up our alley too: tunnel to dogwalk at lateral distance; he had no problems with that and sort-of held 2o2o so he did it twice so we had plenty of opening points. Certainly I was a bit disappointed that we didn't get the Q, but at the same time WOO HOO! he did the gamble, timer be darned. Plus at the end of a long day, for him to have any go/out oomph left in him was fantastic.

Another try at Gamblers, Jumpers, and Standard tomorrow.