The Chilterns Show

We had a really fab time at the Chilterns Show. Big thanks to Penny and all the Barkshire Bandits for their warm welcome and hospitality over the weekend.

Gemma had to work, since it was all arranged so last minute so Paul, Alison, Trish and I travelled down Friday evening and stayed with Joy and Becca just outside Bicester making our journey to the show the following morning much more bearable. We had loads of help from our fellow competitors boxloading, on the line and taking down times and of course Steve who is rapidly becoming an honourary Demon! lol We were first in Div 3 with the Demon Racers, a slight change to the line up this week with Drake coming up from the 'Pawz' to replace Faith and Lexie swapping places with Mac in the 'Demonz' we hoped we might achieve some faster times with this line up and we did...having run 19.61 last weekend and 19.47 this week. More practice with this combination should hopefully yield some better times going forward. We only lost one race in this division but ended up on a 3 way tie with fastest times used to decide the positions and ended up 3rd but were more than happy with the way the dogs ran. We were really grateful to Kristian and Sharon from the High Flyers for their help boxloading and collecting the balls, Steve on the line checking changeovers and Linda from Northants for taking down our times. We then ran the Speed Demonz in Div 1, seeded 5th, we seriously expected to get our butts well and truly kicked! We had swapped Lexie with Mac this weekend; although the timing system on the line shows that they run very similar times, Mac runs best start dog and so does Dylan, we just felt the team would gel better with Lex in it and we were proved absolutely right when we ran 17.59!!! (with a 0.13 late start!) still half a second faster than last weekend and the fastest we've ever run before! This was the 3rd fastest time of the day and we did indeed end up 3rd in the division running consistently sub 18.00 secs all day....very very pleased with that performance! :)) Must mention Paul who did a fantastic job running Bailey, Steve on the line who was vital in us achieving our best changeovers, Linda from Northants taking down our times and Darren from 'FourPaws' who boxloaded brilliantly. Couldn't have done it without them all.

Sunday saw us back at the show as I was judging div 5 and we were running the Demon Pawz in div 4. I really enjoyed judging Div 5 which was a tightly fought affair with some very good teams and handlers (including our own Paul who was running a dog for Northants Falcons and did a fab job)...I was really impressed by the consistency of changeovers, particularly from the Bristol Ball-sitic Rockets (boy were they buttock clenchers??!! lol) as well as the number of rolling starts we had (where the start dog hits the line on the exact right spot so the clock keeps running)...great racing all round and well done to the eventual division winners 'Snatch and Grab'. I was particularly fortunate to have some excellent line and box judges, including a number doing the job for the first time who were really first class :)

The 'Pawz' was the team I expected us to struggle most with since we had taken the fastest dog (Drake) out and replaced him with Faith. It's fair to say Teal is also a little unpredictable and Ethan has his moments too (of which he had several! lol) Teal ran superbly all day, the routine of taking her up to the box and doing a runback every time we run seems to be just what she needs. Steve boxloaded this team for us too which I'm sure helped. Ethan continued to have 'blue lane moments' which is becoming rather frustrating...despite his natural left turn he's totally distracted by the other lane when he runs this side and insists on turning right and while he never runs as fast he also has a habit of running out, fortunately we have good old reliable Spud to bail us out when Eth has his silly head on! lol The nicest suprise of this team was Faith who, over the 9" hurdles, dropped more than 0.5sec and actually ran faster than Drake had last week! (the hurdle height doesn't seem to make any difference to him). We smashed our seed time and ran 20.00secs dead which is fantastic. My only worry is that this may land the Pawz and Racers in the same division on some occasions (eek!) with a little over 0.5sec separating their seed times, but really nice to find that swapping Faith and Drake has actually strengthened both teams, something that doesn't tend to happen very often. 3 seemed to be our number of the weekend with a 3rd with this team too!! We may have got 2nd if I hadn't had a few lights with Teal (and Alison hadn't fallen asleep on one leg with Spud lol) but hey....lights with Tealey...she was really 'up for it' so I'm not complaining!!

All in all a great weekend and well worth the long journey down to Buckinghamshire. The weather was nice the company was good and it was a lovely friendly and relaxed weekend all round.

p.s. during one of the 'intervals' (where the Bandits did a demo in the main show ring) we did some singles time trials in the flyball ring for fun and managed to clock Bailey at 3.95secs over the 9" hurdles!! Go that dog!

Off over to Anglesey this week for our 10 day team holiday that incorporates 3 flyball tournaments, am hoping to get some agility training in while over there too...will try to remember to take lots of pics!