AKC at the not-so-cold Latigo

January at Latigo is always a risk - one year it was about 5 degrees out, and not a whole lot warmer inside. We got lucky with a little bit of a warmup leading up to the trial (Friday was 60 degrees) and then about 50+ on Saturday, and maybe 45 on Sunday, so not so bad really, though it felt warmer outside in the sun than in the arena!

This was our first AKC show since the Thanksgiving trial at the same location. I thought the judge's courses were good with challenging aspects, but very fair for the most part.

On Saturday, Skye had one of those hardly-ever situations where the course turned left but he went right. That resulted in a backjump, but the rest of the standard course went well. I saw on the tape that I did not rotate soon enough for him to know where we were going.

He ran a nice Jumpers run though, so we got a Q for the day.

Rip had a good standard run and hit all his contacts. His AFrame especially is nowhere close to what I want for a finished product - he gets to the top and comes down very slowly, but better than a big launch I suppose. No trouble with the chute this trial, and the rest was clean for a Q - yeah!

Rip ran his first ever Exc. JWW course and did a really great job. There was an offcourse trap right before the weaves that got a lot of dogs, including Rip, but still it was a great run and even with the offcourse, he was within .7 seconds of Skye's time.

For Sunday, we again started with Standard. This time Skye ran fast and clean and even managed to get 3rd place! Sweet.

We ran a jumpers course that was going to force me into two consecutive rear crosses, along with 3 front crosses. I botched the second rear cross, pushing Skye off the jump, so we didn't get any Double Q's this weekend, but still ended up 50% overall - cant really complain.

Rip's Standard run was not great - he did some sightseeing at the top of the AFrame and was a bit distracted in the beginning of the run. He took an offcourse tire, and then came off the table after the weaves. We finished the second half of the run much better than the first. I was shocked to find out that even with those 2 faults, it was still a Q, which earned us Rip's Open Standard title!

In his Exc. JWW run, we really ran a great run. So proud of his focus and jumping. The last jump was the triple, and the top bar came down, but still, what a great run. A big "awwwww" was heard from the crowd when the bar fell. Rip was only about 2.5 seconds off the 1st place time, which I am really happy with, since he was pretty wide on a number of turns, (worth about a second or so), and I am trying to speed up his weaves, which would be worth another second.

So Rip also went 50% and earned his title so we are now in Excellent for Std and JWW.  Our next show is 'CKC' - a big event in Denver in a couple weeks at the stockshow. We are doing 3 days, including FAST, and a demo run of T2B which should be fun.

It was great hanging out with a whole bunch of folks from FAAD - I think we had 10 students entered in this trial, and even more came to watch and support - such a great group!