After getting my car repaired last Friday morning, the pups and I headed down to Glen Carbon for two days of a three-day trial. I met up with Tammy and she and I grabbed dinner at Zapatas, a Mexican Restaurant right near the hotel. I highly recommend it if you're ever in the area. Really good food and they have different things on the menu. Nancy also joined us and most of our conversation turned to Vizsla talk and breeding and bloodlines; what we like, what we don't like, etc. It's really cool listening to them and I'm learning a lot. No snipe-y heads or gay tails! Yuck!
This trial was indoors at a soccer facility on turf. Ruby hasn't run on turf for over a month so I thought it would be interesting to see how she adjusted. The turf also wasn't like the turf we normally run on. This was a very tight AstroTurf instead of the longer plastic faux grass with the black rubber beads. She did seem a little hesitant on our first run on Saturday which was Standard. I read the running order wrong at the gate and almost missed our run (turns out there was another Ruby toward the end of the 24" dogs which I thought was us ~ oops!). It wasn't a tough course to remember but it was tight in some spots. Not a big deal but she had a slight bobble as she misread a front cross and ran with me right by the aframe instead of taking it.
The rest of the course she ran beautifully even getting a tight turn off a jump to the table. Most dogs went straight for the DW as the jump faced it and their handlers tried sloppy, backing up front crosses but I just hung back and indicated a jump/wrap to the table. I made sure she hit the yellow on the DW as it was a similar set-up as the Challengers Round at Nationals (DW/jump to finish) that got a lot of dogs blowing their contacts. I won't mention who got away with the blatant bad call that Sherry Porter made in the 24" class that day. This dog jumped clear over the yellow, not even a toe on the red line and she didn't call it. She just stared and it looked like she thought about it but her hands never went up! The dog ended up winning the class. Not good...if you're going to set up that kind of challenge in your course design you better get your A-- there to judge it!
We then had a nice, big running JWW course by Blair Kelly. He's a really nice but tough judge and likes to analyse the results on his courses. I've heard he's a mathematician or something. Ruby did really well and had adjusted to the turf though I have to work on where I set her up as we had a slow start off the line. It was a tunnel start and I could have/should have set her up further back but she's been acting up on the start line these last few trials; not sitting where I tell her, throwing her body around and barking at me. She's nuts! She placed 4th in JWW.
Saturday night the three of us went out for dinner again and Whitney joined us for sushi at Nori in Edwardsville. Good stuff and I'm glad she came out with us. It was a lot of fun! =)
Sunday was another good day with lots of straight lines on both courses. If you couldn't get there, you were in trouble. Ruby placed 2nd in Standard and 3rd in JWW for QQ Number 14. Now we just need a couple of good weekends...
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