Lune Valley

I’m cautiously optimistic about saying that Dylan really likes working indoors. His runs at Lune were all smooth, fast and – at the end – slightly bonkers. I’m happy to roll with this! I’m normally at South Durham this weekend, but the classes weren’t as nice for Grade 4 dogs, and I’m not a huge fan of the Prissick Base venue. It was a lovely sunny day at Myerscough though, they opened the big arena doors and the whole place felt so light and airy and huge.

Combined 4-5 Jumping was a nice course with a nasty start, and we got E’d. Dylan broke his wait, panicked, and then decided to just take a bunch of jumps in the hope he’d be forgiven. He wasn’t, but we finished up the run and his jumping was lovely, very smooth and neat.

Graded 1-4 Agility was a very fast, very open course, no seesaw (!) and a little bit run-of-the-mill style course. Dylan’s Aframe was a little slower than he can do, but the rest of the course was beautiful, again with the smooth gorgeous jumping. Not as driven as his run at Ribble, but still clear and a good run. Since the placings were generous I thought we might scrape a top-10. Apparently I’m a rubbish judge of Grade 4 though, since we finished 2nd! Less than 0.4s seperate 1st and 3rd, so bit of a close finish! Incidentally, this also gives Dylan enough points for his Agility Warrant Silver, which I only realised when I got home.

Graded 1-4 Jumping was a bit of a killer course, which ran much better than it looked – if you got it right! Dylan worked the first 6 obstacles lovely, very tight on the wraps, but he and I weren’t quite on the same wavelength for the angled flick-flack. He intended to bounce it, I certainly didn’t think he would, and he ended up crashing a pole to avoid running into me. Oops! Finished up anyway with 5 faults – maybe 10 faults? – but Dylan ended running strongly, which was what I really wanted.

Last class was Combined 4-5 Agility. Probably Dylan’s best run of the day, in terms of confidence and speed, but not mine! I wasn’t expecting quite so much confidence and speed, got left behind and was way too late with my commands. I’m going to have to brush up on this because I’ve got Jet at the next show as well as Dylan, and if he carries on running like this I’m just going to spend the day flailing along behind them both. Anyway, we got E’d, but Dylan’s contacts were fantastic, and I was very happy.

Apologies for the crappy Adobe overlay on the video, but I’ve lost all my video editing stuff in the big computer reboot 2010. I will try and replace with a better version eventually!

I’d rather spend a day getting E’d in all my classes, but running with this fast, confident, and driven version of Dylan that I always believed was hidden in there. I talk a lot about wanting a certain win or t move up to a certain grade, but in the end, if I walk away knowing we both gave 100% and it was perfect, the placing is just irrelevant. But still nice to get, because the Lune trophies are really pretty frosted gold glass type things.