Skye's and Rip's AKC Report

We did the 3 day AKC trial at Castle Rock this weekend. Friday was Excellent only, so I left Rip home with Katrina who couldn't come. Skye and I ran Exc. A FAST and managed to get the distance challenge and enough points for 1st place. Skye doesn't do distance very well, so I am always happy when we get one of these or a gamble in USDAA.
We had a great run in JWW and got a Q and 10th place (of about 45). Our Standard was nice and Soooo close to a Q. I had to call Skye off the wrong end of a tunnel and he called off, but then didnt immediately take the correct end, so we earned a refusal.

On Saturday, I was running Rip in his first AKC trial as well as Skye, so I chose to not run FAST which would have introduced too many conflicts. Skye again had a great JWW run with a Q and 11th place, but we were only 2 seconds behind the 1st place dog Summit. Our Standard run was great Except where I bobbled the weave entry and caused Skye a refusal. We were otherwise clean.

Rip had a great run in JWW for his debut, and got 1st place. The surface was lousy as the outdoor ring they were supposed to use was a mud pit, so they setup the course on the packed dirt parking lot. I slipped a few times and I could see Rip slipping as well, but we did OK. Rip's Standard run was pretty good with a few oops's. He was called for his dogwalk contact, and also had a table fault and then he threw in a little offcourse by doing the chute a second time. He ran nicely though, and I really cant complain about his performance. He nailed two fast weave entries, unlike a lot of the Novice dogs.

Sunday was Skye's day with a Double Q, number 12 for us. He had a fabulous JWW run and earned us the most MACH points (15) in a jumpers run that we have earned to date. I think we were 7th place, but not far behind 1st. He had a nice solid Standard run too. We now need just 35 points to qualify for the 2010 AKC Nationals, and we have a 2 day and a 3 day AKC trial coming up before the cutoff.

Rip had a beautiful fast Standard run on Sunday. We again got called for our dogwalk contact, though I thought he was in, and that was our only fault. We were 10 seconds faster than the next fastest dog, though I think there were only 8 dogs in the class.
Our JWW run was going great but when we got to the weaves (I hate having only 6 poles!), he popped out at pole 4 so I brought him back to them (he grabbed a bonus offcourse jump in the process) and then he again popped out pole 4, so I ended our run there - dont want to reinforce the redo-the-weaves that I had so much trouble with when Skye first started competing. Up until that point though he was running nicely, with great startline stay and reading my rear cross.

All in all a great weekend at AKC.