Gap Farm Flyball

The All-New Singing-Dancing Matting: Was good. It’s like yoga matting, kind of. Very grippy, no slipping, very nice. My only complaint was that I’m not sure it works all that well on sand/equestrian surface. It was very “dead”; there was plenty of give but there was very little bounce back. It didn’t seem to affect the larger dogs, but the smaller dogs (especially the height dogs (?)) seemed to be throwing lower times than I normally expect. I’m looking specifically at Kim and Bailey, who seemed to be about 0.5s off their usual times. None of our dogs are as fit as they normally are, but they all ran with enthusiasm, so perhaps it was just a case of height dogs struggling over (their) full height.

It didn’t look to be running any faster times than normal. I think our teams met their seed times or possibly slightly exceeded them, but we were running a slightly different lineup to normal. I’ll be interested to see what everyone else thought!

Anyway, the girls ran well as they always do; Mollie was really raring to go, she ran brilliantly all day. Eagle Owlers (Mollie and Kim’s team) won their division, although they was some close racing to do it! I think the girls quite like running with lovely Chippins, and he looked so settled and enthused running with them.

Dylan was quite excited about the whole thing, he loves running with dogs he knows and he was running with old friends in Lucy, Bailey, Buddy and Stripe. I really enjoy running Dylan with these four, they’re all fairly evenly matched on singles times, we all gel together well as a team and because we’ve all been flyballing for years, we can switch the order around as necessary and still maintain tight changes. Perfect! We were on for the win until we lost the plot against Hinkley, we all got a light in one leg or another and so we knew we had to beat Wilmslow in the last race of the day. We got our act together and we ran as well as we could, but Wilmslow just had faster dogs in and beat us by a well-deserved nose. So 2nd place for the Nights, oh well!

Doncaster next week, just checked the lists and it looks like we have whole different set of dogs, so we’ll have some different line-ups and who knows what will happen!