Chaos Crew

Chaos Crew

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Skye's Fail Blog

As a quick sidetrack, for the funniest pictures and videos, visit the Fail Blog website - its a riot. Skye was doing his own version of a Fail Blog this past weekend at the USDAA trial in South Jordan, Utah. At the same time, my wife finally finished her ADCH with Baby Dog.

It was a miserable weekend weather wise - cold, cloudy, usually rainy, and as we were leaving on Sunday, even snow was mixing in. The trial was on a beautiful horse facility on lush grass (slippery when wet). There was tons of space for off leash frisbee or ball throwing - on a nice sunny weekend the location would have been perfect, but....

We ran 5 runs on Saturday and 2 on Sunday and got Zero Q's. This is the first time I have done a trial and never Q'd.
Half our problems were dogwalk contacts, just like the past couple trials. I dont think Skye hit a single DW contact all weekend, including getting called for an UP contact. I am going to go back to our early release/touch & hold training, as my running experiment with him as been seriously deteriorating week after week. Instead of getting better and more solid, its getting worse. His running Aframe is good though, as is his teeter, so just the dogwalk is going back to the old way.

Our other issues this weekend were a weave popout in Std, a refusal in Jumpers, two dropped bars in pairs, a mishandled offcourse jump in Steeplechase, and an offcourse in Snooker.

On the plus side, he was running fast.

Here's the Agility Fail on video:

7 comments:

LauraK said...

Looks like a fun trial- too bad the weather wasn't nice. Your runs looked great though. Thanks for the words of wisdom for the weave poles- I'm trying not to get too frustrated with weaves haha. The way she started with those weave-o-matics, I thought she'd be an awesome weaver- maybe she will be with time, but we've definitely hit a plateau. I don't really know what to do about it. I'll make sure that I start working on 12...I don't know what it is about her not doing the ones at your place. Just out of curiosity, how many inches are your weaves spaced apart?

Lana Richardson said...

Skye is a fantastic dog. Cheer up man!
The music was way too sad. It fit the rainy weather but Skye was moving a lot faster than the music.

Greg S said...

Lana, funny you should say about the music - Youtube has been stripping out the music most of us put with the videos when we upload them, which they did again in my case. You then have the option of having silence, or picking one of their free songs they offer to go with your video. Since my video is long, there arent a lot of choices so I just picked a blues'y tune to go along with the damp weather.

Greg S said...

Laura, weaves is one of those obstacles that you will forever be working out the kinks. Skye has been trialing now for almost 2 years, and still, as you can see in this video, he had weave issues. I struggle with this constantly.
With Rip though, I dont expect to have the same issues, as I am focusing on weave entries and more independent performance (where he will find the entry and do the whole set of poles on his own). The 2x2's helped with that.
Riley will get faster in the weaves, just look at the first video of Rip doing 12 poles, compared to how is his doing them now - once they get comfortable, they will pick up speed doing it.

Jackie said...

Wasn't it weaves last year? It must just be a never ending battle. You guys will get there.

Elayne said...

Big Congrats to Katrina and Baby-they're such a fun team and so smooth.

Those runs look pretty good overall, just little things here and there. I know it's frustrating to travel so far and not Q but really it looked like you had some nice runs.

Elayne

Morganne said...

Wow! Skye was really moving. He must have liked the cold weather. I did see several bad slips (one really bad one after the tire). I wonder if the footing had anything to do with popping out of the weaves?