Hayfield Lakes

Good weekend, close racing and Notts were excellent hosts. Shame the venue wasn’t as wonderful as everyone else seemed to think (we camp in a tent, flat clean ground is important).

Dylan’s team broke their seed time and won their division, which was great. We also managed to get splits on the dogs for all their races, which was useful for a variety of reasons but from my point of view, confirmed what I already knew about Dyl. He sat out the first race, and then in the second 2 races in the morning session he was running into the same dog (Roi). He clocked consistent 4.8s for those races. In the afternoon Roi was dropped and he had to change into Norah, and his times dropped immediately, and then got worse when he switched back to running into Roi in the second afternoon race (I think his times dropped off to 5.3s at that point, and he normally runs better in the afternoon). He has to change into the same dog otherwise he begins to stutter into the first jump (which is also awful for changeovers).

So, I’m not sure if Dylan will continue running with this team, and if he does, we will have to change the lineup which is not the best option a month before the National Championships. This is slightly frustrating as there’s very little I feel we can do at training; Dyl isn’t comfortable with these dogs away from flyball, it’s not something that will be overcome by practise (although that will help). I feel bad for our team as well, as we’re the weak link.

The girls were in two mixed teams as we’d lost height dog Bailey to injury. We bumped Mollie up a team so she could run 9″ (12″ is too much for her all day), and Kim took up height dog duties in the bottom team, with usual second-team dogs Chip and Buddy to bring a little more speed.

That all fell apart slightly anyway when Mol’s team lost a dog through injury, leaving a 4-dog team! They finished 5th in Div 5, but ran 21s which really wasn’t bad considering we had 12-yr old Mollie, blonde Beardie Biba who is really only in her first season, and 10-yr old Beardie Buffy who hasn’t trained for 9months! Poor Ronnie was the only one left of the original team.

Kim’s team won their division but didn’t run great times, we weren’t exactly on top form but we got lucky on a few legs and pulled a few nose-in-front legs out of the bag.

Champs prep at Nantwich next time, another new venue for us. We’ll be giving our Champs lineups an outing (barring disasters) although I don’t think we know what they will be yet!