Easter weekend is always traditionally the start of the outdoor competition season, be it agility or flyball which I guess is kinda strange because the dates can vary so much from year to year making the weather a tad unpredictable…3 years ago we had glorious sunshine and sunburn at Carlton Towers, the following year we had 6 inches of snow!!
Last Year we decided to go to Anglesey instead and I’m so glad we did, 4 days of lovely friendly relaxed racing and beautiful blue skies and suntans…it was blissful so there was no hesitation in entering the Anglesey tournament again this year, a nice small friendly comp with no horrendously early starts and running from ring to ring! However…as Easter approached the forecasts told of impending doom and gloom…rain, snow and sleet….eek!!
I had a slight feeling of Déjà vu from the previous week when the announcement went out on the Tuesday that the Anglesey tournament was cancelled due to waterlogged ground…oh no!! Easter was cancelled!! After a very small amount of cajoling and encouragment however the wonderful Cheshire and Dolphin teams put a rescue plan into action and managed to re-organise the whole event at Sutton Fields on the Wirral. Since the venue was already booked for a car boot on the Monday there was a small change round so that multibreed and starters would now be running on Good Friday and the open competition would take place as planned over the weekend. Only slight ‘problem’ was that Gemma and I had booked to stay in a friends cottage on Anglesey so now had nowhere to sleep! No need to worry, our wonderful team mates immediately stepped in and offered us an inner tent and airbed in the caravan awning…sorted! We are so lucky to have such a lovely bunch of people to spend our weekends with.
The racing on Friday didn’t start ‘til 9.30am so we didn’t even have too early a start to get there; I picked Rach up at 8.30am and Simon, Sharon and Megan followed with the caravan; we passed Paul, Alison and Nico on the motorway but Gem was already there when we arrived so the 3 of us ring partied for the first division then went straight on to run in Div One of the multibreed. This was a rather ‘thrown together’ team which consisted of two of our collies (Bailey and Dylan) and my Teal (cocker) along with Steve’s Ruaraidh (that’s ‘Rory’ to any normal person lol) who is a collie/kelpie cross and Kathryn’s two standard poodles from Blackpool Supernova team, the lovely Leo and Finnbarre. For anyone that isn’t aware, multibreed is a sanctioned competition that runs independantly of open competition so dogs may run for any multibreed team regardless of their ‘normal’ open team. You must run four different breeds at any one time and may only include one crossbreed. This meant of course that we had two dogs that had to run every leg (Teal and Ru) and the collies and poodles would have to swap so we alternated between Ru-Leo-Bailey-Teal and Ru-Finn-Dylan-Teal and this seemed to work really well, Kathryn’s changeovers with her boys were just brilliant and we managed a fastest time of 18.13 with the first combination and went on to win the division…not bad for our first foray into multibreed but very much a combined team effort! I am fairly certain this team is capable of running sub 18.00 but I did make an interesting observation about Teal…that is that she is very much more ‘up for it’ when Gemma and Bailey are in the ring…I think this may be due to the fact that Gemma has run her before and is good at winding the dogs up on the start. Rather frustratingly this team also ran faster than our top open team and I know this is entirely down to changeovers…hmmmm…work in progress me thinks.
We have an additional speedy crossbreed available at Drax for the May bank holiday weekend so have (bravely) entered two multibreed teams there and will split the collies and poodles up; the intention is to run Teal as the height dog on one team and Squirrel on the other! Provided Squirrel behaves herself (and I am determined she will!)…these two teams will be very evenly matched for speed which should make for very interesting racing!
After all the multibreed was finished they ran a (slightly damp) division of starters in the afternoon, our team, Demon Novaz, consisted of 3 of our starter dogs…Squirrel, Jovi and Fynn, 2 from Supernovas, Kathryn’s beautiful lurcher Saffron and Gail’s little collie Mia along with Katherine’s little ‘Ronnie Rocket’ from Rotherham. Before we even started we knew we had 3 fairly reliable and experienced starter dogs in the form of Squirrel, Saffy and Mia, 1 unkown quantity in the form of JoJo and 2 total muppets in the form of Fynn and Ronnie so we weren’t hoping for much other than 4 dogs up and down and that’s exactly what we got. It’s a shame really that Jo and Squirrel both ended up having to run at the same time because Squirrel made a few errors and I think that was entirely down to me having to run Jo instead of her. I’m going to make sure this doesn’t happen again and I run one OR the other, I don’t want to ruin the good work we did with Squirrel last season. The two Novas dogs were fab, Squirrel was ok but did some nice speedy runs and was driving off the box nicely which I was pleased about, Jovi…considering she’s never run with other dogs or another lane was actually pretty good…she has a very strong eye but I learned that, provided I always lined her up on the left so she can concentrate entirely on her own lane, she’s fine. Dissapointingly we had problems in the last race when the team we were running against obviously had a last dog that was liable to run around and wreak havoc once it had finished, result…they positioned a ‘catcher’ half way up the lane, between the two lanes who chased the dog back and screamed ‘LIE DOWN, LIE DOWN’ at it to stop it from misbehaving. All very well and good but PLEASE would competitiors and judges consider the opposition team dogs when doing this sort of thing!!! This person was doing this just as I was releasing Jovi to run last dog on our side, result…a very frightened and confused dog that didn’t want to go up the lane (and who could blame her!) so I ended up having to wait ‘til the team had completed and the shouting had ceased before I could send Jo…not exactly very fair or considerate from either the other team or the judge in my opinion.
Amazingly we did get some good clean runs out of both Fynn and Ronnie in the warm ups (both also very excitable and likely to be distracted by the other dogs) and Fynn actually managed to complete a leg in competition too…there is hope! I have also very kindly been offered a place in the Alpha starter team at the ring party/training day at Drax this weekend so will take both Squirrel and Jovi and run them one at a time, see how we get on there then we have a combined Demon-Tyne starter team entered at Drax for the May Bank Holiday weekend too.
Fynn...at least he's a pretty face I suppose...lol
The main Open tournament took place over the weekend and we were extremely fortunate with the weather…dry, bright and breezy!
We had the Demon Racers running in Div 3 on Saturday, just three divisions of racing for that day so another lovely lazy 9.30am start…could get used to this! We were bottom seed by 0.3secs on a realistic seed time…needless to say…we got slaughtered. I was pleased with the way Mac was running though, his times have improved from Drax the previous weekend so hopefully he’ll be back to end of 2009 times once his fitness improves. I was particularly pleased with his box turns in the afternoon once the ground had dried up. I had started alternating Fly and Ethan as last dog (Fly runs best in this position and Ethan can only run in this position); he was running 0.5sec faster than her and Rach did a great job of swapping between the two and maintaining some nice tight changeovers.
Sadly Ethan went very very lame and had to be withdrawn from racing, he’s been suffering from an intermittent lameness/stiffness in his back end on and off for around a year now (started at Anglesey last Easter) which has steadily been getting worse and resting doesn’t seem to have helped but I have never seen him quite so lame as he was on Saturday…my poor, poor boy could hardly stand up after completing only a handful of legs so I took him along to Tom (orthopeadic vet who runs with the Dolphins) to have a quick look over fearing he had damaged his hips or something really terrible. After a thorough examination and some motion tests Tom’s initial diagnosis wasn’t great but could have been worse. Eth has a full range of motion in both hips with no sign of pain or discomfort in either of those joints or his cruciates so that definitely isn’t his problem, it appears most likely that he has sufffered injury/damage to the intertarsal structures in his right hock, apparently quite common in ‘sports’ dogs which is resulting in pain/inflammation after exercise and causing the lameness. We’re going to have to have x-rays to diagnose this for sure but the good news is that this is something that may well right itself over time. The surgical answer would be arthrodesis…making those small joints fuse together but this is also possble to achieve through pain management and a continuation of current exercise/activities which will eventually result in the same thing…a fusing together of the joints and an end to the inflammation/pain. I want the x-rays done before he runs again just to make sure that is what is causing the problem and running him on pain killers isn’t going to make anything worse. A dose of Metacam on Saturday afternoon and he was right as rain and hasn’t been lame since so it appears that it is the flyball that is aggravating the joint (so hopefully flyball will also be the cure!)
A slightly earlier start on Sunday morning (ok…still only 9am but we were getting used to 9.30am by then! lol); that said we weren’t involved in the first division of the day so still no rush for us. This turned out to be a beautiful day of sunshine and blue skies. I was judging the second division in (div 5) and the team were ring partying for me…what a great job they did too…Megan scribing for the first time with Rach operating the lights and supervising and Simon box judging…very professionally done :o) There was some really good racing in this division and with quite a few teams running on submitted times the added ‘excitement’ of break outs too. The Forge Mill team earned a very well deserved 1st place…worth the drive up from Worcestershire I’m sure.
We were racing in the last division of the day, Division One…again we were bottom seed and again we struggled although Teal did run a little bit better than she has for the last couple of comps so hopefully she will improve with the more we do. We ran a 17.84 with a smidge early change from me but just really struggled on changeovers again. We did have a change of handlers/running order and I think this will be the one we continue to run with now so everyone will get the chance to ‘bed in’ to their position and hopefully we’ll run more consistently. We ran Rach/Bailey start, Gemma/Faith second, Alison/Dylan third, me and Teal last. Rach really has been thrown in the deepend, coming from running a 6 second dog in the bottom divs to suddenly running a 4 sec dog in div one! She’s doing great but is understandably taking a bit of time to find her feet and confidence so start dog seems the obvious place to begin. Gem ran Faith second in an attempt to get Fi to focus better (I think she needs a firm hand) and also to utilise Gemma’s passing skills, Alison and Dyl moved from last to 3rd to help Alison improve her changeovers…Teal can be hard to run behind so the changeover should be easier behind Fi…Alison is also having to learn changeovers after spending two years running start dog with Dyl so this should come as the season wears on. Teal much prefers to run last and comes out much better to an empty lane…she is also the only dog we can send in on Dyl that does not result in his occasional ball dropping. Fingers crossed we can continue with this combination and see some improvements.
Although we had no rosettes to collect at presentation we did have plenty of awards!! Alison collected Dylan’s silver and I collected Teal, Faith and Ethan’s silvers along with Lexie’s Platinum…that was a lot of trapsing up and down! lol
Alison and Nico holding Esther at presentation...
Next comp in a month’s time at Drax, another bank holiday weekend and more multibreed…hopefully we’ll get some training in before then too :o)
