Bakewell Flyball
Back at Bakewell; for a showground I hadn’t visited before this year, I seem to have spent a lot of time there this summer! It was lovely this weekend, masses and masses of empty space for the exercise area.
We had a bit of a disaster leading up to the tournament when two dogs came down with Kennel Cough, so we had to withdraw one team and remix the others rather drastically. Because it was so last minute, some people weren’t able to switch days as well, so we really did have a very odd mix of teams!
Dylan was running with his usual teammates Bailey and Buddy, and then Jet and George from the top team. Like all the teams, we struggled a bit in the morning to hit the times we were expecting; the grass was very long and damp in the arena and the dogs just couldn’t get their footing. We also didn’t have a lead dog for this team, so Buddy and Dylan shared duties. Dylan actually did reasonably well, but he looks up at me rather than forward towards the lane, so our starts were a bit off at times. Thankfully we won’t have to do it again! Either way, we won the division and just had great racing all day, lots of fun.
Kim and Mollie were on Sunday, with a complete mixed bag of dogs. Kim was running as height dog and as anchor, as we had three dogs who all prefer to run lead dog. The team actually ran really well, but we made a few too many mistakes and lost three of six races (in a 7-team division). We were the only team to beat the fastest team in the division, which was fantastic racing and pushed us to our best time of 20.90s.
End of the summer season means we’re reassessing all our teams and trying to get singles times on all of the dogs; Dylan was hovering just under 5s all weekend, but I’m fairly confident in saying he usually runs a bit quicker than that. He didn’t appreciate the ground and he also wasn’t happy having a strange boxloader, it makes a big difference to his turn. Kim was just over 5s, and ran that all day, despite being over her full height and in a 7-team div. Mollie varied between 4.8s – 5.2s, even over 12″ and not running lead, where we know she runs faster. Somehow our oldest dog is also the fastest?!