Dinnington Ruby Club

A very quick review of the weekend tournament at Dinnington Rugby Club, sorry I don’t have any pics to go with it.

We had both teams running on Saturday and Tyne had all four of theirs on this day too, it was pretty busy! In light of the reliability/timing problems we’ve been having with the Demon Racers I decided to run the Demon Pawz as our second team and submit a time that was achievable by our slowest combination, ensuring that we had the same 3 dogs running all the races with Mac and Ethan alternating. Mac running start and Ethan running last so the middle order stayed the same…Pip, Dottie, Fly…Ethan ran all the races in the red lane (so he could turn left every time) and Mac ran all the ones in the blue lane…a seven team division so they had 3 races each…sorted! This definitely worked better and we got much more consistent times and won the division!! We still achieved a fastest time of 20.67 so not bad going at all. The team Squirrel was running with (Tyne Titans) were in the same division as the Pawz although they were bottom seed and did struggle in the division. All the dogs ran well though including Squirrel! I have pretty much figured out (I hope) what I need to do with her and what I can’t do, she’s very tuned in to where I am and what I’m doing so I have to be aware of that at all times! (she’d probably make quite a good little agility dog lol).

We ran the Demonz on the new box again and this caused us a few issues and unfortunately lost us a few races, we had a different boxloader with Paul taking over running Faith, in preparation for Belgium, so I don’t know whether it was that or whether there is actually a problem with the box, these Alvah’s are known for being a little temperamental, we’ll see how it is in training this week. The long and short of it was that a few times it didn’t trigger when it should have done and others it randomly triggered when it shouldn’t…darn it! On the plus side…We ran Alison and Dylan back start dog again since we ‘think’ we may have cracked the ball dropping issue (hurrah!), the dogs all seemed to run ok on the box and Bailey was certainly back on form. We managed a new seed time of 17.93 in the first race :o) While I was looking at the box before the afternoon races Teal went off with Gemma and her boys and, for some reason best known to her, Gemma thought it would be a good idea to repeatedly throw a ball…on a very hot day…resulting in a knackered little spaniel!! Lol I ran her in the first couple of legs and she was like a slug! Fortunately, we had Lexie on this team sheet since Dylan had shown signs of a shoulder strain earlier in the week so the cocker was put back in the van and I ran Lexie instead, it never does Faith any harm to have to run her own height (13”) from time to time because she’s rubbish at it! We completed the last two races of the day with Dyl, Bai, Faith and Lexie instead. I’m actually pleased Lexie got a run. Despite our poor results we ended up on a 3 way tie for 3rd place and ended up 3rd as we had the fastest time, pleased to see our lovely friends Rotherham and Tyne come first and second…(especially since both teams run dogs I bred lol)…excellent result!

On Sunday we just had our combined starters team running, Demon Tailwaggerz. Fynn seemed to suddenly realise there were dogs running in the other lane and had a few stupid moments, Viggo got spooked by a dog crossing over into his lane and totally lost the plot (he is such a baby!) but Maisie and Jovi both ran great and I was especially pleased that they also both ran together and passed each other. We had also run Jo in the warm ups on Saturday and she’d been fine so have bitten the bullet and entered 3 teams at Pontefract this weekend!! This means Squirrel will be coming back from Tyne to run for us and she and Jovi will be running in a four dog Open team…wish us luck!