Rother… Tyne?

Tournament at the usual Rotherham venue, but run by Tyne Tailwaggers. Out to confuse me from the start.

Kim and Mollie’s team was a bit of a mix, and we lost pretty much everything, apart from the one race against our arch-rivals Doghouse (to clarify: we love Doghouse). Mollie was running consistent 5.1s over 12″, Kim was also around 5.1s but she did run a 4.9s first thing, which suggests to me that if she’d been against faster dogs she’d have probably been a bit faster herself. She was the height dog as well so she was over her version of full-height, and it was baking hot weather, so very pleased with the girls. The team just didn’t work, sadly, so our times were pretty shocking and it was 3-leg losses all round (sometimes 1 or 2 leg losses, as one of the team dogs has started interfering for the first time in his life).

Dylan was really not feeling well when we got home on Saturday, and eventually we made the decision to pull him from Sunday’s racing. I don’t regret this at all; I know Dylan would have raced had I asked him to, which is why I had to make the decision. By the time we got home on Sunday he was recovering nicely, and is back to his usual chirpy self now. It appears it was just a 24-hour bug, thankfully!

So, we had pulled Dylan, and one of the other dogs Buddy also went lame on Saturday, and with the Beardies (all three!) in season, we ended up scratching one of the teams. About an hour after pulling the Division 2 team Ghost Owlers, George and Jet also couldn’t run (illness and chiro orders, respectively!) so that left poor Murphy all on his own! We recruited a few other NFC dogs, and since Mollie and Kim hadn’t exactly been racing the day before, we let them have a few legs in the NFC team too. Kim ran with Francis, (aged 10 years, already a boxloading/ring-party/vice-captain pro) to let her try running a dog in a team for the first time. Kim was a fab little teacher and Fran did brilliantly too.

Dylan’s original team ran with four dogs — we couldn’t put Murphy in with them as he’s just too fast! — and they got a new seed-time of 19.98 and finished 2nd. Unfortunately there was an incident during the last race and they went down to three dogs, but they still ran their socks off, and I got plenty of photos.

It wasn’t a great weekend for the teams, but at least it was sunny and the fit and healthy dogs all got to run in the end.