At least we got some money out of it!

Skye and I did the USDAA trial in Laramie over the weekend. It was not nearly as successful as I had hoped for, though there were some bright moments.

On Friday (they started at 4pm), we started with Gamblers and looking at the gamble, I just knew Skye was not going to get it. We were to go over a jump, and then send out to the chute which was out past the teeter. Skye loves the teeter, so I knew that is what we'd get, and we did. I had a nice opening though, with two very nice dogwalks.
We then did Performance Steeplechase and had a really good run and got 1st place.
The last run for Friday was Snooker and it was bad - jump a red, do a jump / 6 poles sequence for the 7pts, and then Skye blew me off and took the offcourse #6 tunnel. 3 obstacles and done. He did give me a very nice leadout though, probably 50ft.

Saturday we only had 2 runs. It was like a very long, drawn out AKC show. In the morning we ran Jumpers, and we really did have a good run but with 1 bar down, so NQ. After waiting 7 hours, I then ran Standard. I was worried about the AF / tunnel discrimination coming off the table so I positioned myself to take the tunnel out of the picture, or so I thought. What I really did was take the tunnel AND Aframe out of the picture and caused Skye to run around the AF into the other end of the tunnel. When he came out, I told him to climb up, and he went back into the tunnel, so I told the judge we were done and we left. I was really mad until I looked at the tape and saw it was mostly my fault.
I elected to not run Perf. Grand Prix on Saturday as we already are qualified and had a 1st place bye from Pueblo.

On Sunday we had 3 runs scheduled, plus the 2nd round of Steeplechase.
We ran another round of Standard, and this time had a nice run, but we got called for the dogwalk contact. It required a 90 degree turn off the dogwalk to a jump and many dogs left early.
We then had pairs and ran with Doc and Kai - a pretty reliable team. We fortunately ran this clean and got the Q. That's our 5th pairs Q meaning I don't need any more for Performance ADCH. I am very happy about that as I really dont like running Pairs since Skye is a jerk to 90% of the dogs out there. I always have to manage him and make sure he doesn't try to go after my pairs partner dog.
Next was Round 2 of Steeplechase. There were 3 other 22" P dogs running and we ran last. The first two dogs got offcourses and the dog that ran before me was called for the AFrame contact. In reality, we could run conservatively and should still be faster than those other 3 dogs by an easy margin. This course called for 2 AFrames, and as we approached the first one, Skye more or less stopped short in front of it and wouldn't go up. WTF. I told him again a couple times to climb it and finally he did. I am sure we wasted about 3 or 4 seconds on that, but it seemed like an eternity. We ran the rest of the course fine, and had no faults so YEA!! we got 1st place and a check for $21 in winnings.
To finish the day, we got another Snooker course. I felt good about getting all 7's in this one (7pt was a spread out serpentine of jumps). We were going great until Skye dropped the bar on the 3rd red jump. I then had to think about what to do and try to make it to the close, but Skye took one of the jumps in the serpentine so we were done.

Not sure what has happened to our Snooker runs lately. Before it seemed like we Q'd every one we ran, but I think I've managed to NQ the last 4 or 5.

Rip running contact training

Since we did the DOCNA trial a couple weeks ago and missed most of our contacts, I have gone back to really reinforcing them using a hoop at the bottom. Initially I had trained him to hit the "box" that I placed on the contact zone, but as his confidence built up, that deteriorated.
I am going to see if I can rely on muscle memory to get a consistent performance. I have tried to run him over his contacts every day. I have a little more than 3 weeks before his next trial - his DAM team at the Rocky Mountain USDAA Regional.

Here is a video of our training. I think his dogwalk is looking AWESOME.

Rip is on a DAM team!

I've decided to enter Rip on a DAM team at our upcoming September (11-13) Regional event! I have no expectations of a Q, nor does the rest of our team as we all have inexperienced young dogs. In fact, that inspired our team name "Black and White and Green". We will join Mary w her border collie Split and Val with her smoothcoat border collie Trickster for a fun, no pressure, lets-get-experience team. If we can run clean, it will be interesting to see how our times stack up to the Masters dogs.

Skye is also on a PVP team with Susan Anderson's dog Ring. We are both pretty consistent, and Ring needs the Q for Nationals (Skye qualified in January), so hopefully I can help Susan out. Since Skye is mostly white and Ring is all black, I came up with the team name Ying and Yang. If you are not familiar with that, its typically represented by this symbol:

Rip's Debut!

This weekend Rip and I did a DOCNA trial as his agility debut. He did a great job!

We had some issues as expected, but overall he was fast, enthusiastic, and had a good time. My Rip boy is the best! We MUST do about 100 more repetitions with the hoop on the AFrame though. He missed most of his AFrames, though on the plus side, he did hit almost all of his dogwalks.

A couple times he thought the dogwalk was the teeter, so he slowed at the top before realizing it was the DW. We had a few run-by's on jumps, but that's OK - its my handling that I need to adjust as Rip is not Skye.

We only Q'd 2 of our 8 runs, missing a couple due to dropped bars (in jumpers) and a couple due to jumped contacts (Standard), but all the runs were great.

Here is a video of some of them. Check out those weaves - love my 2x2 trained boy!