April AKC Trial - Saturday

Well, we had a very interesting weekend, lots of stories to tell, so I'm going to split this up into two parts - one for each day.

After Philip had finished his title at the last trial, I had to email the secretary of this trial to move him up to Open - no biggie, we got it covered. When we got to the trial on Saturday, I figured out we needed to move a height down (read the previous post for details), so again I went to bug the secretary. This was a more complicated change, but she seemed to have gotten it down, so off we went.

First up was the Open Standard run - I thought it wasn't quite as hard as the one last weekend, but there were still plenty of tricky spots. We started off to a good run, and close to the end was the dog walk, ending to a curved tunnel straight ahead, which would turn the dog back around to the weave poles which were right next to the dog walk. I approached on the outside of the turn, and my plan was to stick a front cross in right before the tunnel while Philip was finishing the dog walk. Good plan, right? Except that Philip zoomed up and over the dog walk at the fastest I've ever seen, then he totally ditched his stopping point and sprinted to the wrong end of the tunnel, all before I could interfere. So I wait for him to get out of the tunnel so I can send him back in the right way, he pops out and sprint back on the dog walk - duh! At that point I finally get his attention, he turns his head, falls over from the dog walk up-ramp (he's fine, but it sure looked dramatic!), and then finishes the course with no other mistakes. Of course that little feat of his gave us two wrong courses, so NQ for Mr. Dramatic.

Next run was Novice JWW, and we were going at 8" height, so I hoped for no knocked bars this time, and I was right! Woohoo, Philip had a beautiful clean run, finally getting a second Q, only one more to go! Will the new lower jump height save us from all our troubles? We could only wait to find out the next day :) Oh, but the fun doesn't end there - when I went to see the results, I couldn't find Philip on the sheet for while. Finally I saw him under the 12" height, but we ran 8" so I was confused. I thought I'd go check with the secretary (who knew us by name already, ha!), and after a little double checking, she figured out that she had changed our entries only on one of the computers, while the JWW results were entered on the other one. So more changes for them to make, reprinting the results, etc., but thankfully not messing up any placing since Philip was the only dog who got a Q in both 8" and 12" heights.

We then had another run on Saturday - Novice FAST. I think I've mentioned before that FAST isn't offered very often, and other than our run at the mud trial (which basically doesn't count!), this was our first real try at it. I was surprised at how easy the course looked, with big-point items right at the beginning, and the send bonus going for a total of 30 points (out of 50 needed), so I wasn't worried about getting enough points at all. The send bonus was a jump followed by a tunnel, which also didn't look too hard at all. I devised a plan of action, and we stuck right to it, with Philip doing everything I asked of him perfectly, what a beautiful run! We definitely had a Q for the run, and we had gathered a total of 67 points, but since the places are determined by points, I waited to see what happens with that. There was only one other dog in our jump height, and when the results came up it showed 66 points them, so we got first place by just 1 point!

Read about Sunday's runs here.