Flyball at Gap Farm

Well, this was a couple of weeks ago and was our first tournament of the year and our first time out competing since October. We have some new team members for 2010 in the form of Simon, Sharon, Rachel and Megan Morgan (yep, we’ve doubled in size overnight! Lol) and their smooth working sheepdog Fly. We are all practically neighbours since ‘the Morgans’ live in the same village as Paul and Alison which is the next village to mine which makes meeting up together nice and easy (apart from poor Gemma who lives some 40 mins away in Manchester but considers our house as her second home I’m sure lol). Some of our dogs have run with Fly before since we were all previously members of another team so I already knew what to expect when planning teams. The first decision we made was to always run Fly last dog, at least for the time being. I don’t like having dogs that will only run in one position and in fact Fly is not one of these dogs but I do know that she has a very strong eye and runs out much better when there’s no other dogs in her field of vision. We also ensured that the rest of the team were well at the back of the ring and out of her immediate eyeline so she could focus on Rachel and her reward ball. We have some work to do to really get the best out of Fly (her boxwork is atrocious!) but something as simple as running her last dog made an instant difference and knocked a considerable fraction off the times she has been running. We ran her in the Demon Racers with Mac, Pip, Dottie/Lexie and Fly last, this was the first competition back since having pups for both Dottie and Lexie, both ran well, just need to get a bit fitter. I had submitted a time of 21.50 for this team and we ran a fastest time of 20.89 (so not a bad estimation!), we had been seeded 5th in Division 4 but came away with a respectable 2nd place!

Vid of this team in action…. Mac – Pip – Dottie and Fly.


The Speed Demonz were top seed in Division One, based on our pre-break seed time of 17.71 and running the same combination of dogs, Dylan, Bailey, Faith & Teal. Poor Rach got thrown in the deep end running Faith in this team as did Simon who was our boxloader for the day, Simons first time boxloading and Rachel's first time running Faith and her first time in Division One but they both did a brilliant job! Faith is starting to get back on form and ran really well, much more focused than she had been pre-break. We had issues with Dylan dropping his ball so just moved him to last dog (where we know he won’t do it!), this does affect his times but better that than a fault every leg! So Gemma and Bailey ran start, not his favourite position either but I didn’t want to change Rachel’s changeover with Faith and no-one is going to run a cocker start dog are they?! Lol Our times weren’t very good but they were consistent, considering we’ve only trained once since we last ran everyone did a really great job with changeovers etc. We had the benefit of Sharon to collect balls and Megan on the line for both teams who did a brilliant job of taking down all the split times (that girl can write fast! lol) which gave us the opportunity to review the splits when we got home. This revealed…Bailey was about 0.2secs off his normal pace (as I would expect with him running start), Faith was running better than she had been and getting back to her best (yipee!), Teal was 0.25-0.35 off her best…I had noticed in the videos that she was throwing in a lot of double strides so she is lacking fitness but she also came in season the next day, this could well have been affecting her. Dylan was about 0.2 off his usual pace too which is down to him running last BUT this is less of an impact than we’ve previously seen with him which I put down to running in against Teal as opposed to a bigger dog, worth making a note of this!

This team running against the Alpha Dogz...(Bailey, Faith, Teal, Dylan)


and again aganist Barney Owlers..


These videos were taken by my friend Minna who was over from Finland for the weekend, Minna took home one of Vi and Dazzle's boys...she owned their great grandfather Jouko (Fin CH Pikkupaimenen Fair Play) whom these babies are line bred on.

Also making his open competition debut for the host team Notts Supadogs was Spark-Kes son Tarn, Bryning Goshawk. He ran brilliantly in Division One and their team knocked 0.5sec of their current seed time! :o)



I picked up Drake's Silver award and Gemma and Bailey picked up their Chica Chicana award too! :o) All in all a good day running on a new and fantastic surface...can't wait for the next one!