Rother-Drax

Well we had been entered to run at the Rotherham Rockets tournament to be held at the Phoenix Sports and Social club in Brinsworth on the Saturday, this was the last ‘indoor’ show of the winter season (I say indoor but it’s actually run on grass in marquees) but news came through early in the week that the ground was waterlogged and the whole tournament was being moved to Drax Power Station Sports and Social club instead! I didn’t mind because I like this venue too (fab and reasonably priced food in the clubhouse!!) and this venue fitted in better with the planned ‘hop’ up North to Newcastle after the comp to attend the North East BCC open show on the Sunday (6 dogs entered!)

Well, best laid plans and all that…the short story is that it turned out I had ordered my new van gearbox from a bunch of total cowboys (International Car Spares in Oldham FYI…be warned and do not order anything from these people!!) and it never arrived…I ended up cancelling this order (still waiting for my refund of £750!!) and having my existing gearbox re-built locally, needless to say…weekend arrived and I still had no van so we ended up taking a minimal team to Drax (in my hired Nissan Micra!) and we had to miss NEBCC…for the 3rd year running!! ( I think this show is jinxed for me).

Rach and Gemma came and stayed over Friday night and we set off early Saturday morning to Drax, the Micra was surprisingly nippy over the big hills of the M62 and we arrived in good time. We didn’t bother taking our box as Steve Leek had kindly offered us the use of the Dolphins box (which is the same model as ours); I kind of regretted this decision because, despite being the same model it is not adjusted quite the same as ours and we did have some box issues over the course of the day. We were running 2 four dog teams since I had only been able to fit 4 of my dogs in (Faith, Mac, Dottie and Teal…Ethan and Lexie stayed home) and Squirrels open debut was postponed yet again. The dogs ran just ok, Teal is still not running that well and Faith is still not focusing and is therefore inconsistent. Dylan and Bailey both ran really well and both clocked a number of sub 4 sec times but we struggled on changeovers and consistency, tried a couple of different running orders and were just generally crap! We had similar issues with the second team too but somehow managed to come 3rd with them, no idea how…a 3 way run off for 3rd place and we had run the fastest time so were awarded it! This team seems to suffer stamina issues, running much quicker times early on in the day and then struggling in later ones…this is definitely a team that benefits from having more than 4 dogs so we can swap dogs in and out. I am consoling myself that we are always rubbish at the start of the year but improve as the season wears on…fingers crossed!!

Here are a couple of photos kindly taken for us by David Flood from the Cambridgeshire Canines team who also kindly boxloaded for us in the afternoon (My lovely friend Hazell had driven down to do this for us in the morning but had to head off home before the racing had finished so she could sort her dogs out to run their Tyne teams the following day)

I particularly liked this pic of Mac…


And this one of Pip…


Here’s an interesting couple of pics of Faith turning the wrong way so she can ‘nosey-beak’ at the dog in the other lane…her natural box turn is to the right but when she starts doing this we will switch and load her left.

So here’s her left turn loaded right (the way she SHOULD be turning)…

And here it is when we switch and load her left…


I’m not sure if this actually makes any difference to her speed/times but it’s really infuriating!! Either way she loses time compared to her normal right turn...wonder if I could invent some dog blinkers like racehorses wear?? lol

There are a load more pics here

Will post the report from Easter weekend (just gone) later...

Ending on a High...

So…this weekend was our last outdoor comp of the season as a team and we headed over to Norfolk Heritage Park in Sheffield for the Steelers Flyball team debut tournament. We were running both teams on the Saturday since Gemma was working Sunday so it was another busy day for me being involved in all 4 divisions. Squirrel
and Radley ran in a combined starter team – Norfolk Mix and Match, 2 Demonz, 2 Steelers and 2 Water Orton dogs, this was a really nice mixed breed team with a collie, parson, cross breed, lab and 2 working cockers (the other cocker in the team turned out to be a cousin of Radley)…they ran brilliantly…I was SO proud of my babies and they won the division with a fastest time of 19.95 :) We each got a lovely rosette and memorial shield.

Next up were the Speed Demonz running in Division One, Brigg were top seeds with a time of 17.94, we were second seeds on 18.13 but since Brigg had to pull out at the last minute we were now the favourites by about half a second. Sometimes this sort of pressure is not good and we were still running the experimental team from Stoneleigh with Teal in as the height dog so I wasn’t sure how we were going to get on. I needn’t have worried , we ran the fastest time of the season in our first race with a 17.90 with Dylan, Bailey, Faith, Teal and then went on to run 17.91 with Dylan, Bailey, Lexie, Teal. Drew ran both Faith and Lexie and did a good job swapping between them both, although they seemed to be running similar times they do run quite differently with Lexie faster on the way in and Faith faster on the way out, this obviously affected both his changeover behind Bailey and mine in with Teal but we seemed to settle into the spot quickly and the team just seemed to ‘gel’. Teal really seems to have found her feet and is running better than she ever has, all the boxwork we’ve done over the summer, getting her to drive off faster is paying off and is making all the difference to her times…now we just need to work on her hurdling consistently! (she often puts an extra stride in between hurdles when he stride isn’t quite right, this is quite common for short legged dogs). It all went a bit ‘Pete Tong’ in the third race where, for some unknown reason, Teal was hitting the box and driving back off so fast that she completely forgot to catch the ball!! This is one of the dangers with teaching drive off the box, you are effectively moving the dogs’ main point of focus…i.e the reward isn’t in getting the ball but in getting back faster. You often find that the fastest flyball dogs are ball ‘spitters’ and it’s a common misconception that a good flyball dog has to be ball obsessed, I have actually found this to be the opposite. The ball really needs to be secondary to whatever the reward at the end of the runback is to get them to run as fast as they can. If you watch the REALLY fast American teams their dogs are all trained to a tuggy. Anyway, I digress…we took Teal out and ran all 4 collies, this wasn’t the fastest team you’re ever likely to see because they suddenly went from 8 to 13” and it did throw them all somewhat (especially Faith who struggles over this height) so the changeovers were atrocious but we did manage to win the following 3 legs and win the race. We went on to win both races in the afternoon too and Teal ran fine (thankfully) so obviously won the division…a lovely way to end the season and another collection of rosettes and shields  I am confident there is another 0.5 second in this combination of dogs so we will spend the winter training this combination and see what they can do! (although Teal is due to carry out maternal duties some time over this winter too!)

The Pawz ran next in Division 3, we had Mac, Pip, Drake and Ethan. They all ran ok and this was a very tight division so we ended up on a 3 way tie for 2nd and came 4th…bummer! Lol I think we ran around 19.70 which was better than last weekend but still not great. I think maybe some of the dogs are ready for a break.

I was judging the last div of the day, Div 5 which was ANOTHER 7 team division!! My back and legs were aching so much from being on my feet all day by the end of it! This was a really nice division and was won by Minster Monsters from York who were running a lurcher, GERMAN WIREHAIRED POINTERS and munsterlanders…lovely dogs to watch running!

It was a lovely show, fantastic venue, good ground and plenty of space with a café on site and a lovely friendly and relaxed atmosphere throughout, I really enjoyed it. Despite the forecast and the previous few days we didn’t have a drop of rain and in fact the sun came out! Everyone knows…the sun goes where the Demonz go! Lol We have been so fortunate this year to see very very little bad weather. Presentation was a really small and intimate gathering and it was really nice to receive Dotties’ gold award and Macs’ Platinum from Howard along with Paul getting Pips’ Gold too.

Lola is coming along nicely, I decided to make the most of the lovely venue and good weather to snap some pics of her….

Here’s one of Travis too, looking very serious!!

And one of him at home…pooped after his exhausting day out…

Other news this week…Viggo has mated Dazzle, I have hopes that he will be a great little stud dog on his performance because there was no messing around and he got on with it like an old pro! lol (granted, Dazzle is not a difficult bitch to mate). We should hopefully have blue/white and slate merle pups due around the 8th November…can’t wait!! (you can read more about planned/expected collie litters here btw)

I also heard from Kerena that the Dream Team qualified for the flyball at Crufts at the qualifier at Prestbury Park over the weekend which means that their young working cocker Magic, Bryning Makin’ Magic (a Drake-Teal son) will now be competing in both the YKC Agility Dog of the Year AND the flyball. I am so pleased with this litter and can’t wait to see Maizys’ pups growing up!

Star pupils and class clowns!

'Perfect Pip'

Well, the weather stayed fine enough for us to do some flyball training last night. Conrad, Jackie, Paul and Alison came over and we spent quite a long time with the babies first. Radley was a little star and as she gets more confident about what she's doing she's starting to demonstrate her dad's speedy turn off the box! I have high hopes she's going to be one speedy little dog! We trained her mostly with Teal to begin with and also did a little with Faith, while her pups are only just 4 weeks old she just did a little bit over the low jumps and wasn't exactly speedy! I hope we can build her back up gradually and have her back to full fitness for the Euros...keeping fingers crossed!

We then got Squirrel out....the less said about her performance the better!! I'm putting it down to her being in season at the moment! She was AWFUL...the attention span of a gnat! I have ordered her some new 'different' tennis balls as this seems to make quite a big difference to whether or not she's going to keep hold of it. She doesn't like small balls but sometimes struggles to hold onto the harder full sized ones so we're compromising with full sized softer balls that she can 'squish' a bit! She would have to be different!

I then decided to get Viggo out and just have a look at him...the first runback he did was actually more like a 'walkback' lol He was really unsure about what was being asked of him (this is Vi all over!) and slowly stuttered over the hurdles. However...the second and third he started to get the idea and was really getting into this game, pulling on his harness and running down with purpose! Then we tried sending him up to Paul for his squeaky ball until he was having the ball rolled down the box front (and doing some nice turns actually! lol). He thought this game was great and just kept running up and down the jumps by himself. Now this is quite cute and at least demonstrates that he knows what to do but could get quite annoying if it becomes a habit! For now I want him to enjoy it and be happy but we'll have to nip the 'laps of honour' in the bud! lol

We then ran Pip (Paul), Mac (Conrad), Drake (Jackie) and Ethan (Me) together while Alison boxloaded. Now, for a first attempt at running a (manic) trained dog within a team I was really impressed with Jackie and Conrad! Mac and Drake are not the easiest dogs in the world to run (one pulls like a train and the other wriggles like a cobra!) but they did a really good job. There is so much to learn about running a dog that experienced handlers take for granted. Pip was putting in some lovely four-footed turns off the box, she's running really well at the moment. Mac was a bit of a plank about the starters netting still being up and kept running out but we got him sorted. Drake and Ethan both ran fine although I was finding it harder and harder to see Drake (an almost entirely black dog!) coming back as it started to get dark so my changeovers were seriously suspect!

All in all it was a good session and I was pleased with (nearly) everyone. Gold stars to Radley, Viggo and Pip and a big red penned 'must try harder' for that naughty terrier!!