Wednesday 20 May 2009

Arbury Hall and my Ambidextrous Dog!

We were at Arbury Hall over the weekend, it rained... alot! However the rain could not dampen our spirits!! We had 3 teams in, missiles ran Saturday. They were Tyne, Sky, Jive, Chelsey, Guinness and Fraggle. There was a big improvement in this team from Stockbridge, they all ran really well. Guinness was hitting the box alot better, and i think the cooler weather suited Tyne, Sky and Fraggle who looked alot more focused. Chelsey was a little star, you wouldn't think it was her 2nd competition, she can run anywhere and has a cracking box. Fraggle had a new audience to impress as none of the teams there had seen him race before! Unfortunately they found themselves in division 5 rather than 6 so were a little outclassed and ended up coming 5th but the main thing was that they raced well.

Sunday we had the rockets in division 3. They were Sonny, Perry, Smartie and Jamie. This was such a close division!! I think all the teams were running low 20s or v late 19s so every race really could have gone either way. I had the pleasure of running Perry as Bobbie was running Jamie. Most of the races went to 5 legs and we were just abit unlucky in a couple, we ended up coming 4th with a best time of 19.97secs which we were really pleased with considering the ground had deteriorated quite alot by Sunday.

Ball-istics were 2nd seed in Division 1. They were Diefer, Rosie, Asher and Bunty. Was lovely to have our height dog back and be running over 10" again! First race against Kiddy Monsters didn't really go to plan, we just didn't gel and weren't very fast so we lost that one although Asher's box actually looked really good despite the slippery ground! In the next 2 races in the morning things came together and we started running well, not super fast but we won. Don't think I was working Asher back aswell as I could cuz I was too scared i was going to fall over lol! Not sure what time's he was running but Mark said he had got him at 3.8s on his phone. In the afternoon, we had 2 races and you get to find out what my post title is about!

Now I may have mentioned before that Asher was trained to turn right on the box as a young dog as from about 7months he looked like a definite righty. At 18months just before his 1st comp he decided he didn't like turning right and refused to turn that way so we swapped sides and it took me ages to get his left turn as good as his right turn was. Towards the end of last yr and a couple of times this yr he accidently had the ball loaded on the wrong side and went up and adjusted himself and turned right which I thought was very clever of him but didn't think anything of it! Now in the 1st race in the afternoon he went up, hit the box and basically did a somersault, I think people thought that it was a dip infront of the box that had caused it but I watched him and it was because he'd tried to turn right even though the ball was loaded left ( everyone still with me??!), so the judge kindly arranged for this dip to be filled and we ran again and he turned right again. So next leg we loaded it right and he went up and did a 4-foot turn to the right. We won that race. Last race was against High Flyers, decided to give him a warm up with the ball on the left again just to double check that he wasn't just trying to turn so that he could see the other lane (as we were now in red lane and had been in the blue lane in the race previous) but he insisted on turning right so we decided to load it right and just let him sort himself out. We had a really fun last race against the Flyers, we took a leg off them (light) and had a really close last leg as we managed to get Bunty a bit of a lead but Chuckle was just a bit too quick for her! If anyone can shed any light on Asher's turn, answers on a postcard please :-)! So we finished 3rd with a best time of 18.41secs (last leg of the day!).

Was really nice to catch up with people we haven't seen for aaages and race against teams we don't usually see. I still don't think I have managed to get rid of all the mud, and haven't even looked at Asher's harness since, don't think you can tell it is blue anymore! And just for the record I was tucked up in bed by 9pm Saturday and had nothing to do with signs being moved to the flyball ring!!

1 comment:

Kristian said...

Arbury was great fun and some great racing. See you Bristols got your fastest time of the day against us well done! Asher and Badger racing each other was funny and I think they thought oh my champion pairs partner is in the other lane. As for taking those Northants Falcons parking signs... I know nothing!