Weekend Fun

Max and I did something different this weekend.  A friend told me about a CKC fun rally and agility match near us so we signed up.  Now I've never done rally before but this same friend told me it wasn't too difficult and that we could do it.  CKC's idea of a fun meet wasn't quite what I was expecting as there was no training in the ring.  Also - there is far more to rally than just sits downs and heeling.  I really had no clue what we were doing and had to get a quick lesson on the commands but Max was an awesome team mate and just went with the flow.  He listened to very unconventional commands such as "oh oh Max - now you have to blind cross me and get in close" - pretty sure that's not an official obedience command!  Regardless we managed to get a qualifying score under a very generous judge.  It was fun.  We might take some rally classes this winter during our agility hiatus.

In the afternoon was the agility.  Since we have never competed in CKC both dogs were in novice.  I had some very specific goals for both dogs in the standard.  With Max my goal was to have him blast off the start line.  He was a bit distracted walking into the ring but started well in both runs.  The rest of the runs went fine too - a couple of handling errors caused faults but I was happy.

With Rylie my goal was to be consistent with contact criteria.  His aframe contact was lovely but he didn't stop on the dog walk and I let him keep going :-(.  In our defence though the dog walk was a lot lower than what we are used to.  The rest of the run was lovely and he actually beat Max (although I'm not telling Max).

I let Engineering Dad run Rylie in the jumpers course.  It was far harder than any starters jumpers course I have ever run and now I think Engineering Dad has a lot more respect for the fact that there really is some skill involved in handling!

It was a good day and fun was had by all though.

We are still woefully behind on the contact course but I do have some nice shiny new equipment compliments of Engineering Dad and we are making progress.