'Shattered and Sunburnt'

Anglesey at Easter

Well, who would have predicted the fantastic weather we had over the four days we spent on Anglesey, blue skies and sunshine from the time we arrived to the time we left...absolutely perfect :)

With only 6 divisions of racing over the weekend we had plenty of time to enjoy the fabulous weather, the big open spaces for dog walking and the fantastic flyball and agility training facilities provided by those lovely PODS. Racing started at 9.30am each morning although we were racing in the last division on each day so we got to enjoy a nice leisurely walk and breakfast in the sunshine followed by a very civilised hour lunch break and presentation around 4pm. The whole weekend was just a very leisurely and relaxed affair, a perfect little flyball holiday.
Breakfast on Easter Sunday...boiled eggs and 'soldiers'...what else?!! lol

Paul also introduced us all to his new favourite vodka cocktail...Apple Pie...a specific brand of Vodka (sorry, can't remember which), cloudy apple juice and a sprinkling of cinnamon...absolutely delicious (it does taste just like Apple pie!!). I'm so glad we decided to spend our Easter over in North Wales; Anglesey is one of our favourite venues and chances are we won't be at the summer show this year as it's only on for one weekend, it's a bit of a trek for just 2 days.

I'm also really glad we took Faith and the pups, she got plenty of exercise to help get her back fit and they got lots of time and attention.

sunbathing on Gemma's lap...look at all that milk still!!

a short vid of the pups playing...

Dora also had a whale of a time, she was able to be allowed loose pottering around the caravans most of the time and really enjoyed the freedom, she's a very easy little pup to have around, she loves company but is equally happy off playing and amusing herself and so far (fingers crossed) she has a fantastic recall!

Both teams ran well but we did get an awful lot of lights! We ran the same dogs in the same order as last weekend but swapped all the handlers so we might as well have been starting from scratch! lol I did get to run Mac start dog again though which is something I always really enjoy. I also had to run Teal as she suddenly decided she was going to be a mummy's girl and didn't want me running Drake instead of her! I think it may have been something to do with the fact I had been doing some chute training with her in the morning. We've started loading her ball in the left hole as she's now decided that's the way she's going to turn. I remember Oskar took a while to make his mind up so maybe it's a spaniel thing! The Alpha's did a brilliant job boxloading for us though which was greatly appreciated and Genna has offered to be our boxloader for the Euros which will be great. I judged div 2 on the Sunday and really enjoyed it, the racing was tight and the relaxed friendly banter between teams was really nice.

On Monday Gemma and I competed in the flygility with Bailey and Teal, this involved a short agility course and then straight onto a flyball lane, the dog must bring the ball back out of the lane and then do the agility course back the way they came. It sometimes takes the dogs a while to understand that they're doing agility and flyball at the same time but Teal seemed to pick this idea up quite quickly, so long as I didn't move past the first agility jump on the way back before she'd exited the flyball lane (else she thought we were done with the flyball bit and dropped her ball!). The course started on the weaves so dogs not weaving got to miss the first obstacle and got a 10 sec penalty, you then got a further 5 secs for every obstacle you (the handler) had to run past so the further you can send your dog ahead the faster time you get. I just decided to run the agility course with Teal because at this stage she's still learning and I want to keep her confidence high, she did however complete the whole course (minus weaves) in the fastest time of the day, under 16 secs. Gemma and Bailey predictably won it (again!) as he was the only dog that would send on over the whole course and back again so they incurred no penalties, he did the whole lot, including the weaves in under 20 secs. Go Bailey!!

I had also agreed to run Squirrel with the Dolphins starter team on Monday but after her performance in training recently wasn't sure this was such a good idea. It wasn't a problem because they had a 5 dog team so I could try her and take her out if she messed about. Well, unfortunately a Dolphins team member had to leave urgently on Monday morning so that left them with just the 3 dogs so Squirrel had to run. We took Viggo over with us too, in desperation really because he really isn't ready to compete. We tried running Squirrel last dog in the first race of the day but she just got so excited watching the other dogs go she wanted to just chase them instead of going for her ball (bad little parson!!) so we ended up trying Viggo and...he did it!! We won that race :) In the next warm up we tried sending Squirrel first with Gemma on the box to get her focused, this did the trick and she ran fine after that. We even managed to get two rolling starts on the last race of the day! Don't think I've ever seen a terrier running start dog before?? lol Vi didn't run again, they'd started the flygility in the top arena and he was totally distracted by that and wouldn't bring the ball back. To be fair to him, it was a big ask, I only showed him flyball 2 weeks ago and he's done about 10 mins training so I really didn't expect anything from him. There's plenty of time to let him pick it up slowly. So our little starter team of Squirrel, Steve's Rory, Roxy the cocker and Bridget's Tearlaidh ended up unbeaten and winning the division!! Not bad for a first outing and especially considering how our day started! Paul took a couple of short videos of Squirrel running so I'll upload them when I get them.

We're over at Sutton Fields this weekend for the judges training seminar and starters competition. Radley will be making her flyball debut so we're hoping to get a little training session in one evening this week and see how we get on. I just hope Squirrel remembers what she's doing!!