Dashin' Dogs

So we got there Thursday late afternoon and pitched the tent with great difficulty due to the wind, thankfully everyone chipped in to help each other; we needed 3 people to set up my tent and we needed 5 people to tame Sam’s!

As usual, the week consisted of some dodgy toilets, stupidly long queues for the shower, one day of unbearable weather (80mph winds... not fun in a tent) and an ever deflating air bed! But what is great about weeklong shows is the team morale – we can all look back and laugh now at what we tolerated but on the plus side we enjoyed cocktails at the Keating’s, a wicked Chinese takeaway, a dodgy training DVD, a fab walk on our day off and spending some quality time with our dogs as well as the agility itself of course. Big disappointment of the week was that the Bingo was cancelled as the Marquee was unusable as a result of the strong winds!

My dogs had a fantastic holiday, and Mum’s Stitch took really well to camping although he was a little terror around the rings screaming ‘I wanna do that!’ at the top of his lungs non-stop! Our camping neighbours took great joy in watching Stitch tear around our make shift garden carrying numerous items he stole (socks, pants, cookies, poo-bags, hairbrush) with Matt and myself hot at his heels.

As for the results it wasn’t a great week for me; Phee spent half the week ill and I pulled her out of the ring most runs. The thing with Phee is that you never know what you’re dealing with until she does the first jump and she can vary from hour to hour so it was always worth a try (last year at this show she won up to G4) she got her act together in the last two days but decided to put her best performances in when she was in the combined classes against short collies or speedier spaniels (no chance), on the graded classes she thought it would be more fun to gain 5 faults. I’m sure a blind judge robbed us on a trophy in the graded 3-5 agility on the last day by missing the foot she put on her dogwalk contact 1 obstacle from the end. Grrrrr.
Kif just wasn’t fast enough this year – he took great pride in collecting a clear round rosette in every colour the show had to offer but unfortunately was not fast enough for the places, he’s only 3 and I know he has the capability to speed up if he’d just relax, open up and jump the jumps at the right height!.... Maybe next year?
Good old Sprite brought home some top 5 places but struggled with some of the tighter corners set in the ‘anysize’ classes and again, the competition was just so tough this year so no 1st places.

Sam & Billy went up to Grade 3 and I lost count of the number of places they went home with!
Mike & Rio had a number of top 10 places
A number of my friends at SWAT travelled up the grades, most having their best results hung over (shame that didn’t work for me or ‘Ant-y Abi’)

We will definitely be attending Dashin’ Dogs next year although hopefully in a caravan!