NADAC at El Pomar Park, June 20&21

It was 1 year ago this weekend that Skye and I started trialling in agility. We have accomplished a lot in this last year, and this weekend was just the icing on the anniversary chocolate cake. We played on the short day Friday, and on Saturday.

Somehow, we managed to earn 5 titles while going 7/9 Q's. We finished our Novice Chances and Novice Touch-N-Go titles, which also earned us our Novice Versatility title. Then we had great runs in Open and got our Open Tunnelers and Open Jumpers titles, so we will move up to Elite in those for next time.

Our 2 Elite Standard runs were quite nice. One I got a Q while the other was NQ'd, though the run was still really nice. I had strangers tell me that they enjoyed the runs, which is always a good feeling. I did try to slip and fall on the wet grass during Chances, but caught myself, so not sure it's bloopers worthy.

My Skye-boy had great weave entries all weekend and no pop-outs. We missed one Weavers Q by not doing a leadout and having Skye too far ahead of me coming out of a tunnel, with the weaves being the next obstacle. He went by those and continued into an offcourse tunnel. After bringing him back we kind-of started over, and then it went fine from there.

All in all, we managed 5 1st places, and one 2nd place (Chances doesn't have placements). It was a great "warm up" weekend before the USDAA Regionals in two weeks, and it gives me a good confident feeling going into those.

Greg & Skyeboy

Pictures of Kaylen

I took the camera out today and got quite a few pictures of Kaylen (since I didn't have many).

NADAC Castle Rock, June 7&8 2008

We played agility this past weekend at Castle Rock. We managed to Q half our runs, so 6/12. It seems either Skye or I figured out a way to NQ all 4 of our Elite Standard runs this weekend. We managed two not-so-pretty Q's in Novice Weavers to earn our title. We had two nice Open tunnelers runs for Q's and two 1st place runs in Open Jumpers.

Novice Chances once again managed to elude me. I am going to forever be in Novice in Chances. Saturdays' I messed up by not running fast enough and pulled him of the dogwalk contact. Sundays' I messed up by giving a bad signal and caused a bar to come down in the distance part.

In Standard, I give credit to Skye for our first missed Q, as he only wanted to weave 10 poles (twice). Our next chance on the same course, reversed, he decided to not go up the Aframe and seek out the hidden tunnel entrance under it. Probably that was half my fault and half his. On Sunday, in our next Standard run, I didn't support the tunnel causing him to go in the wrong end (our time was good - would have been 1st). On our last chance, the reverse of the previous course, we missed the tunnel/dogwalk discrimination.

On the bright side, even though Saturday's weaves were bad, we didn't have any trouble with weaves on Sunday (and yes, we DID do weaves on Sunday :-) )

Skye and Storm, who trains with us, were the two fastest dogs in all of Open Jumpers on both days.

Kaylen moves to level 2

My little "crazy pup" Kaylen has moved to Level 2 agility. She is doing really well, especially in comparison to the last couple times I tried to teach her agility.
On her first level 2 class, she was volunteering the teeter, which is a big accomplishment because in the past, the teeter bang would send her looking for the nearest exit.
She also decided that the dogwalk was lots of fun - she went up and over on her own without me asking for it. She had never done a DW before!
We sequenced 5 or 6 jumps and she is starting to have some good speed where I am having trouble keeping up.
We are using weave-a-matics and she is doing nicely with a fairly shallow V angle. I need to work more entries with her so she gets more comfortable hitting them.