Weekend

Oops, nearly a week since the last update! I guess I just don’t have much to discuss at the moment, and it’s nice to have a weekend free of competition!

The dogs all ran well at flyball training on Wednesday and Saturday. Dylan has been working his socks off for me. He’s scheduled to make his “official” Open debut at York in the Night Owlers, and he hasn’t run with any of the dogs in the team before so we’ve been making sure he’s ok with changeovers etc. Thankfully he is! It should be a decent team, but hopefully the weather will be a bit cooler this year. Our lead dog Big Archie is a heavy-set black Lab who can suffer in the heat, and I have no idea how Dylan will work as we’ve never had to deal with higher temperatures yet. On the other hand, it was pretty warm yesterday and he didn’t seem affected (unlike Mollie, who got a little too toasty!) so hopefully he’ll be ok.

The girls are both running in Marsh Owlers again, not sure how we’ll do as we have a couple of dogs running who can produce some cracking singles times but who can also really not! Plus we have the two manic black hairies Mollie and Lolly, who won’t stop if they overheat so we’ll have to keep an eye on both of them.

We’re also camping for the first time with ‘Owlers next week, it’s the club’s 4th Birthday and we’re having a bit of a party. The venue at York Racecourse is fab and Dog Friendly are hosting, so it should be a good tournament.

The results from EMDAC went up on Tuesday, along with the updated League Tables. Kim should qualify for the Primary Jumping Grand Prix Finals without much issue, she’s 5th in the League at the moment and I don’t think she’ll drop out. We almost certainly aren’t going to qualify for the Agility though, unless we have a great placing in Saturday’s Last Chance Qualifier! We are also going to get automatic promotion into Novice Jumping at the start of the new season, but it does look like I’m going to have to apply for promotion in Agility unless we do particularly well at Midland Counties. Our issues with agility this year haven’t been with the contacts, just generally with the courses and bad handling or simply being out of the placings, so hopefully we’ll get the OK. I’ve known for a couple of months that Kim wasn’t going to get the Primary Medium Dog of the Year, we sacrificed our chances to do flyball earlier in the year. Both the dogs in front of her are fantastic dogs though, I’ll be thrilled if either of them wins!

As I said before, I was really hoping Dylan wasn’t going to go into the promotion window for the Jumping, but unfortunately he has. The top 53 dogs are automatically promoted, and Dylan is currently 48th. Arg! I’m confident that he can cope with the Primary Jumping courses but I would have liked to stay as Introductory for another season, it would have been a big boost for both of us. I’ve still got my fingers crossed that some of the other dogs might overtake him, but if he does get any more placings at our next 2 competitions it’s very unlikely. Thankfully he does get to stay in Intro Agility, and I think our chances of qualifying for the Agility or Jumping Grand Prix finals are about very slim.

Our running orders have also come for Dylan’s first KC show. I chose to enter the Thursday only of Northern Week in the hope that the classes would be smaller and therefore the atmosphere might be a bit more relaxed, and Dylan also would be able to do the 1-2 Combined courses rather than the 1-4. Might as well take advantage of entering as a Grade 2 whilst I still could! My guess paid off anyway, his classes are squidgey small (45 in Agility, 47 in Jumping) so feeling pretty optimistic. Kim has two Medium 1-4 classes which ought to suit her as well, with 9 and 10 in Agility and Jumping respectively so no exactly a huge amount of competition! Still, getting placed does rely on getting a clear, so it’s not all plain sailing … !