An excellent pappy

It has felt like ages since the Royal so I was really looking forward to the weekends agility trial hosted by the Agility Club of WA.  Unfortunately I managed to pick up the flu bug AGAIN during the week so it wasn't quite the pleasant day doing agility I had planned plus it was an unseasonably warm day of 29 degrees as Perth does it's annoying launch from Winter to Summer with the barest hint of spring in between.   

Cassie has never competed in that sort of heat before so I wasn't really sure how she would handle it.  I purchased a very cute extra small sized cool coat for her last year so that got a good work out and certainly seemed to keep her temperature down during the day.  I thought she looked a lot more comfortable than some of the other small dogs who were huffing and puffing away.  Her speed once on course seemed as per normal.  She absolutely flew around the Excellent Jumping course using her super pappy warp speed (aside from a brief visit to say hi to the judge, as you do...) finishing with a clear round and her first pass.  Her second run was Excellent Agility and again she flew around the course but unfortunately crossed behind me when I was trying to push her out to a jump and we ended up with an off course.  For her first time in this class was very happy and she handled the see-saw without any hesitation.  I just need to work on getting her to run more to the end.  I'm sure that will come with practice.



I also entered her in Open Jumping for the first time.  We've been working on some distance handling at home and she is going really well so I thought it was a good opportunity to give her additional experience on courses that are generally more challenging.  At the end of the day if the distance challenge is too hard I can just cross over the line.  She didn't do too badly but I thought the heat was starting to take it's toll and although she ran fast I struggled to keep her focus and she went visiting part way through her run but finished off really well.  Lastly we had our first Novice Strategic Pairs run with our new partners Ashleigh and Spirit.  I had to wake Cassie up for this one as she was pretty whacked by that stage.  I had trouble getting her focused before we went in the ring and I wasn't overly surprised when she air scented her Aunty Kriszty watching and I lost her briefly while she thought about going over for a visit.  Thankfully I got her back and we still got through it with a Q and 6th place against all heights.  I'm pretty sure they were first placed 200 out of three pairs.  Spirit was his normal Mr Perfect self and didn't put a foot wrong.

Sonic was only entered in Masters Jumping and Masters Strategic Pairs.  His MJ run was OK but he turned the wrong way over a jump, got all out of position which I struggled to fix and we ended up with a refusal.  He doesn't look lame when he runs and is still running better than earlier in the year but is still not driving off the ground as much as I would like.  So his hips are clearly still impacting the way he runs even with everything that I'm doing.  He has a ball when he's out there though so I'm going to stick with it and see if I can increase his muscle and fitness further to see if that will help.

By the end of the day I was truly knackered and my voice was barely a croak, with a bit of sunburn thrown in.  Our next trial is two weeks away and the really good news is that we now move to night trials until April next year.  I suspect that Cassie will love doing night trials!