Wash Out Weekend

Well, the rains came down and the floods came up and the flyball tournament at Penny Farm was cancelled (boo hoo hoo!)

This is absolutely typical, the one tournament on home turf, less than 10 mins away and it gets called off! I have to say, a weekend at home to tidy up and have a bit of a break is quite welcome at the end of what has been a very busy summer.

Saturday was busy since Tom and Kate had been planning to run a PET passport clinic at Penny Farm for all the people wanting to take teams to the European Champs in Belgium next year. Since most of the teams were from this area they came over here on Saturday morning and we held the ‘clinic’ in our kitchen! I think we rabies vaccinated 29 dogs in total, 18 of which were ours! lol Blood draw will be in a few weeks time then we just have to wait for the titre test results.

We had originally been planning to have a team night out after racing so the whole team (and my mum) went to the local pub for lunch instead which was very nice.

Since it was too wet to do any team training in the afternoon we decided to make the most of the time off and introduce some of the youngsters to the training chute. The training chute is an adjustable device used to teach the dogs to get all four feet on the box and push off for a faster, safer ‘swimmers’ turn. It’s something we really don’t utilise enough but the one we have here was made by a friend a few years ago and although perfectly effective is a large, heavy cumbersome device that takes up a lot of room to store, is a nightmare to transport and is a pain to put up and take down. Mike is currently in the process of building us a much smaller, light weight version that will be much more useful for us (thanks Mike!)

The chute is adjustable to 4 different angles, we started them all on the second setting so it’s on an angle of approx 30°, we will gradually make this steeper as the training progresses.

With the bigger dogs (i.e. the collies) the first stage is teaching them to get on and off the chute using all 4 feet so it’s the movement you’re teaching more than anything. Here’s Trish with Haze and Gemma with Kitten, just teaching them the movement we’re looking for initially. As their training progresses we will work on tightening up the turn.

Trish with Haze…


Gemma with Kitten…


Both of these dogs are quick learners once they know what you want from them, Haze is already very ball motivated but Kitten is much more food orientated, we’re going to have to work on the play drive over the next few months.

With the smaller dogs (ie, Squirrel!), there’s no need to teach them to get all four feet on the box because they have to simply to reach the ball. Here’s me with Squirrel…


…she seems to be picking it up quite quickly so I’m keeping my fingers crossed this continues!

I took a couple of pics of Squirrel and Haze too...



It's been a bit drier here today so let's hope the rain holds off for the next couple of weeks!