Tailwaggers #1

Dylan was a little bit more restrained at this show than the past few months, which was a little worrying initially but he was very relaxed throughout and ran well. Watching back his videos I’m not sure there was a real difference speed wise, but our runs certainly felt smoother, and a lot less like we were teetering on the edge of losing control completely. This may have something to do with the bigger rings, Tailwaggers is a small show so they can have two big rings rather than three squashed ones, so I wasn’t falling behind with cues all the time.

Jet and I are getting it together, slowly. We are finding our wavelengths again! It helps that Jet is just a party girl at agility, as long as she’s having fun she just doesn’t care what happens.

Dylan’s NovicePlus Agility was up first, and was pretty much a “all your mistakes will return to haunt you” kind of run. Dylan was not as driven as usual, but was super-responsive and really wanted to pull-thru on everything rather than driving around the pinwheels and corners. I’m guessing this is a result of all the nagging courses we’ve had recently, so I need to remember to really push and support the lines for him on easier courses. He also decided that stopping on contacts is optional, so we had some minor arguments about that. An big messy E, basically!

Jet’s agility course started with a jump-weave-straight pipe tunnel combination, and I really wasn’t sure how Jet would handle it. I’ve never done something like that with her! I should have just trusted her, because I made her pop the last weave pole and then made lots of silly mistakes on the rest. We finished 4th with 5f because almost everyone got pulled by the weave-tunnel combi, but still not a bad result.

The NovicePlus Jumping was a challenging course, and such a fun class to run, simply because it was an interesting course and a lot of people hung around to see how other people were going to run it. It’s always fun to run in a class where there is crowd appreciation for a good run, and commiserations for the Eliminations. As it happened, Dylan rocked it, and we only made a tiny mistake towards the end where I ran way too deep into the tunnel and didn’t clearly cue the next jump. Dylan just hesitated briefly, but switched leads and we finished strong. We placed 2nd, a fraction behind Lindsay Cheshire’s Wish, so a good result!

Jet’s Primary Jumping was a perfect course for us, and Jet nailed it. 1st!

Primary Steeplechase was a bit of a weird course, but I thought it was within our capabilities. Unfortunately I hung back too long at 9, and then in rushing to 12 Jet had a pole. She then decided to run behind me at 15 instead of pulling through; I need to stand up and be a lot clearer with her, but she does have a tendency to want to work behind her handler (you can see that she thinks about jumping behind me in her Jumping run, coming off 9).

Dylan did a beautiful dogwalk in his final Agility run, but that might be all we can say for it as he got E’d at the start. Jet ran the same course for her final Agility and had a nice clear, although I was a little overcautious with her contacts. Apparently the judge felt otherwise and marked her on the Aframe, but she seemed to be marking every dog that didn’t have a stop contact.

Hung around forever waiting for Dylan’s Steeplechase, another interested-crowd kind of course. Dylan and I put a really great clear in very early, but I had a feeling it would be too wide on the turns and it was. Rob and Chloe clocked an awesome smooth run to go into the lead, and then got whipped by Gemma’s Asher, who bounced pretty much the whole thing. I don’t know who came 3rd, but a Junior handler with a red dog called Misty (?) got the last placing with a brilliant run. We hung around to see if we could get Dylan’s time, but they were running behind with the presentations and so we missed it. I’ll just have to wait until the results go up online now!

I’m not back at Tailwaggers until January now, which is a bit of a shame as I really enjoyed this show! But I agreed to flyball on the same weekend as the Christmas Tailwaggers, and flyball will be just as much fun. I’m also not sure if I’ll be running Jet in January as Katie is home. Must get all that sorted!