South Durham

One of those days that tried to be a bad day, but was secretly a good day.

I only took Dylan, but he made up for being 1 dog by doing the work of 2, as he had seven runs over the course of the day! We started off with Combined 1-7 Jumping, a class I knew we had no chance of getting placed in, but it was a lovely course and I chose to take Dylan the “long way around” the handling options. He ran it well, went a little wide at times and took it at a rather leisurely pace. He was about 6s off the winner in the end, which wasn’t too bad.

Graded 3-5 Agility was a lovely course, and Dylan ran it beautifully; he was a little lazy over the first 2 jumps (I think he was hoping for a turn to the seesaw, no such luck!) but he kicked up a gear and did some lovely contacts for me. However, on finishing I found out the judge had marked his Aframe down contact (hmm!) so we didn’t go clear. I normally try to be philosophical about faults, but I was very disappointed after that class; Dyl’s time was 30.661 and the winner was 30.022, so it was a really competitive run (we would have placed 3rd).

We had quite a break before the next lot of classes, and so we had chance to meet Cat and gorgeous, supercute Pogo, Tracy, Garry and the Aussies, watch Julie and super-Winnie run a few courses, and watch Julie and Gertie get their first win to Advanced by winning the Combined 1-7 Medium Agility.

Dyl and I ran the Open Large Pairs next with Katie and Jet; we never manage to get it quite right! Jet was E’d and Dyl had 5 faults for a pole, but Jet and Dyl always have a good time running Pairs, stealing each other’s leads and jumping on each other’s heads. Always goes down well, but it’s a good job we don’t take it seriously.

Dylan and I wandered over to run the BC/WSD Combined 1-7 Jumping next, which I again figured we had no chance in, but no reason not to give it a shot! He actually ran really well, worked the difficult sections without an issue, finished in 26.35 and somehow in 15th place! Not necessarily a huge achievement, but he was the top Grade 3 dog by a couple of seconds, and that’s a much needed confidence boost for me.

It went a bit downhill after that! Combined 1-4 Agility was completely my fault; I was worrying a little too much about the dogwalk lure after our fiasco at Dog Vegas and didn’t really think about the Aframe! Dylan had a bit of a nutter run after that and started jumping whatever he fancied, including the cloth tunnel. Very naughty etc etc but I tend to just let him go providing I’m not telling him otherwise, it’s taken a long time to get him confident enough in the ring to just stop worrying and run.

Graded 3-5 Jumping was another E; a nice course but really too straightforward for us, all straight lines and a little bit boring. So of course, Dyl backjumped, entirely my fault for being lazy with my cues. Oops!

Combined 1-4 Jumping was a tricky course, and was taking forever to run. With hindsight, I should have come back in 30minutes, but I joined the superlong queue and Dylan just got bored and lost interest in the whole idea. (So did I!) The timer broke for the dog before us which meant Dyl was set up and then taken off the line for the lady to re-run (she did a fantastic re-run and I hope she got placed with it, she made it look very easy!), which really didn’t help his concentration. He went clear but it was messy and slow, and he got confused by the long run across the ring without any obstacles. Poor lad!

Congrats to everyone else who did well!