Lincoln

I really love this show, it’s a great venue and a very relaxed atmosphere. I blame our lack of success on a number of things: 1) we had no Wine Gums on the journey down, and as everyone knows we have to have Wine Gums otherwise everything goes pear-shaped. 2) we saw no Eddie Stobart trucks on the way down, and ever since Michelle Ainsworth related this peice of good-luck making for Daisy (Crazy Daisy Moses) it’s become vital for Kim going to KC shows as well. Finally, 3) Bailey hasn’t won out yet! Over the long course of her career, Kim has always waited for Bailey to win out first. As for Dylan … well, I never expected him to have a successful weekend anyway!

Kim

Brenda’s 1-3 Jumping course was first for Kim, and perfectly set! The kind of course that means E’s and 5’s are handler errors rather than dog errors, which is good for Grade 1-3. Anyway, Kim set off like a little rocket and got the zoomies at jump 5, so we got an refusal. How can I be mad when my 7 yr old dog gets a refusal because she’s too happy? That kind of set the tone for the whole weekend, actually, but I have no complaints! She came 7th in the end with 5f.

The Grade 3 Agility was an interesting course but nothing Kim couldn’t do. The 9-10-11 was a tightly spaced flickflack, probably a foot of space between the wings. I got into completely the wrong place and indicated Kim to do a push-out, which she did beautifully through the smallest gap in the world, and then came over the back of 11. Oops! She flew around the rest of the course though and nailed all her contacts.

Final class on Saturday was the Graded 1-3 course. I walked it and I knew Kim would love it, and she did. She bounced all her jump combinations and really made all the jumping look easy, but she was a smidge tired and hot and so paused at the top of the down ramp of her dogwalk, and her seesaw was hesitant and it lost us too much time. We came 3rd in the end and got those last 4 points (plus a few!) to make up her Agility Warrant Bronze, which was my aim for Saturday anyway. So, once I’ve sent off her Record Book, she’ll be Return of the Kim AW(B). I think she finished in about 30.–s, not too far off the winners.

Sunday was a lot like Saturday. Started off with a lovely Grade 1-3 Agility, really nice course that looked very simple but was actually very deceptive, the jump angles caught a lot of dogs out. I haven’t done a very good job getting that across on the course plan! (Speaking of the course plan, I annotated it for someone and forgot to save the original, so apologies for all the squiggles and notes). Kim had a cracking start and I had a panicked moment where I did a very risky blind cross to the dogwalk and had my back to her for what felt like ages, but it paid off. Unfortunately I then made the same mistake I always make and checked she was getting her dogwalk contact, and then turned to look for the next obstacle and pulled her in front of me. We got a big fat R and I was gutted looking at the times; Vicki and Pippa very deservedly won with a time of 25.308, and Kim’s time was 29.0– and I know we could have made up at least 3 seconds without that refusal. As ever I have to keep reminding myself not to think of the What If runs.

Kim’s final Grade 3 Agility had the was the one course all weekend I didn’t like. Too many pull-thrus that just weren’t necessary to make the course difficult, and the dogwalk entry was potentially very awkward especially for the “baby” dogs in the class who didn’t have the experience or the confidence to pick it up. We got a big E on that one but Kim was laughing at me and just having such a good time as I let her fly around the rest and she just had fun with it, which is all I want from her.

Last class was a big, open and fast Grade 1-3 Jumping course. This was probably the only course I was actually disappointed with because I thought it was perfect for Kim, but we were left waiting on the line for too long (the dog and handler before us made a total hash of it and then tried to fix it and just made it worse and just took ages) and we just lost our focus. She went clear but she was running in a safe middle gear, not too slow but not stretching or pushing for any kind of speed. I think she finished 5th in the end, beaten (amongst others) by Vicki and Pippa, and Sarah and Willow-Beagle, both of whom are Grade 4 now anyway.

Really chuffed with Kim this weekend, she was happy and naughty and running fast. It’s so much fun running with her when she’s like this, she laughs at me a lot and pounces on her lead when she comes over the last jump which is always a sign she’s happy. She’s not as fast as she used to be (last year she would have blitzed that first agility course in about 24-5s, although we would have missed all the contacts!) but as long as she’s still willing to try, I’m still willing to let her run.

Dylan

Lanky boy did not have a weekend to remember. Negatives? He argued with me about weave entries in every class (apparently the second pole is where you go in, not the first), he crept on his contacts, he made up new ways to tackle the tyre, he was incredibly lazy in one class, he was barking in the queue and ignored me a lot. Positives? Well, everyone who saw him (including some people I didn’t know) said he’s got bags of potential and everything wrong was fixable. He didn’t break his wait all weekend, he didn’t pop out of his weaves once we’d got in them, he had no problems with the difficulty of the courses. He wasn’t afraid of seesaws and did them perfectly, and the interesting tyre interpretations got fixed.

Basically it confirmed everything I already knew we had to work on. I am not going to enter him in any more KC shows though until we have a least some of these issues fixed, as it’s just a waste of money and time. He’s doing the Introductory classes at EMDAC over the winter which will boost his confidence and hopefully get him a little more focussed as I can run him with a toy, and we’ll assess again in a couple of months.

There was one class where he did show some of his true colours, the very last class he did, which was an interesting Grade 3 Jumping class and probably the most difficult course Dylan had all weekend. He got E’d at the weaves as we had to have several attempts at the entry but he did the rest nicely, responsive and fast and turning neatly. Proved to me I wasn’t wrong to think he could have done this weekend anyway, but I’m still going to stop entering him until I know we’re sorted. To be honest, he’ll probably just skip Wyre in December since I don’t do many KC indoors anyway.

Big congrats to everyone who was placed this weekend, especially those with top-3 placings:
Alice & Sammy (Jammy Sammy)
Liz & Percy (Danissica Boy of Cha Cha)
Vicki & Pippa (Ruffs Kyria Kalli AW(S) Beg EX)
Emma & Bailey (Bailey’s Bouncing Back)
Iain and Sarah & the Bonwillan Beagles
Helen & Lucy (Jakovall Silent Noon)

For those of you reading via the http://www.undermybed.co.uk/ url and not GoogleReader, you might have noticed updates all weekend on how the dogs were doing via Twitter. (It’s on the sidebar). Feedback wanted — did anyone actually read it?