A very positive start!

So the day finally arrived and we headed off down to Newark for the starters tournament as part of the Robin Hood Country Game Fair. It was a pretty early start as I had to go and pick Hannah and Charlie up first and it was still dark when we hit the road. Little
aisie had to stay home since she came in season straight after making her open debut at Doncaster…typical! I’m actually not complaining as this is her first season and at 18 months old I was starting to get a bit worried she was never going to have one! I took Jovi in her place, she is still technically a starter dog (not got her 200 points yet) and after last weeks performance at Doncaster she needed the practice! I also got a last minute request from Kristian from High Flyers to see whether we had any spares for their Intermediate team since Lola had also come in season and couldn’t run. Since Gemma was coming anyway and Fynn is also still technically eligible for starters (no points on yet); it seemed fitting that he should take his sisters place in ‘Highly Likely’ so that meant we had dogs in every division between us!

We were running two starter teams, one in each division and first up were ‘The Cock Ups’ which was a collaborative team between Demon Dogz, Cambridgeshire Canines and Ready2Fly that consisted entirely of cocker spaniels, 3 from my Rupert x Maizy litter – Charlie, Tarka and Tally, their half brother Travis and their Auntie Radley so something of a family affair! lol I wasn’t quite sure how this was going to pan out as all 5 dogs have shown a lot of promise but spaniels are notoriously unpredictable! For the 3 babies this was only their second outing but still the first time all 5 dogs had run together. We were very unlucky to lose the first race, entirely on ball fumbles (new box for most of the dogs)…the best out of 3 format didn’t allow for such mistakes, this cost the team first place but they did go on to win the other 5 races with relative ease and ran the fastest time of any starter team across both divisions of 19.93 and that was with wide changeovers too so I was pleased as punch with them all!

Too much to ask that they all look at the camera together! Lol


Here’s a video of all the ‘Brynings’ (so Travis is out)
Charlie (Bryning Brock) – Tally (Bryning Totally Trouble) – Radley (Bryning Truly Radley Deeply) and Tarka (Bryning Riverine)


And here’s all the siblings (so Radley out)
Travis (Raezhaven Bryce at Bryning) - Charlie (Bryning Brock) – Tally (Bryning Totally Trouble) and Tarka (Bryning Riverine)


The other team we ran, Demon K9s was also a collaboration of Demonz (Spark and Jovi) Cambs (Spencer) and Ready2Fly (Jessy) along with a Linnott dog too in the form of Beamer :o)
Gemma boxloaded for this team in the morning and Spark ran really well, running every leg in the morning, I was really pleased with all the distractions of a busy public show. This team ran really well together and remained unbeaten all day to romp home with 1st place although I had to pull Spark and run Jovi in the afternoon once Gemma had left (and he didn’t know the replacement boxloader…mummy’s boy!!)

I think Wendy (Beamers owner) got some video of this lot but I’m afraid I don’t have it yet.

Huge congratulations to the Alpha Dogz for organising the event, all in all a good day and well worth the early start and long drive but I got home just after 9pm and could hardly walk when I got out of the van…trapped sciatic nerve…agony!! I sorted the dogs and pretty much went straight to bed but had to be up at 6am to bath dogs for North West Border Collie Champ show the following day!