Shackerstone

I went to Shackerstone for the 1st time last year and totally loved it so was really looking forward to it.

We had 4 teams in. Missiles and Extraset were Saturday. It all started well with me arriving back at camp ballistics at approx 8.15am after a night of drinking Shaka Khan style, i made it to the ring and managed to run Chelsey in the Missiles at 8.30am, pretty good going i would say! I haven't got a clue what happened but I do know we finished 4th with a time of 24.49secs which is good for that team.

Extraset were next in division 5. Luckily Jemma was better so we had the usual extraset team of Jemma, Perry, Sonny and Jamie. This was a fab division to race in with every race being really close. Our last race of the day was so exciting with it going down to a 5th leg decider against Hinckley Hounds which we just managed to nick by a tiny amount. This resulted in us winning the division :-) we had a best time of 20.02secs (again!).

Sunday we had Rockets in division 3 who had a team of Diefer, Elliot, Smartie and Bunty. The team managed to pull out some cracking times in the morning and were under 19 most of the time with a best time of 18.74secs. We had a couple of races of it going fairly smoothly before problems set in, I won't go in to it but the people who were there will know! Diefer was fab, he's really hit his stride again now and was consistently running 4.2s, Elliot ran really well, his box turn was lovely, and Smartie was also great, she gets faster and faster as the season goes on! The team finished 3rd.

Next we had Ballistics in div 1, I was gutted that Piper had unfortunately gone lame (due to his dad standing on his foot when practising his agility, bad dad lol!) so we had Lacy, Asher, Rosie and Luna. After Champs I thought we were sure to go faster on the ground at Shackerstone but without Piper it was impossible! We had been working on Luna in the gap since champs, we didn't much like the idea of pet correctors and such like so Carol had put lots of effort in to getting her to come back for a 2nd ball. We'd also tried various positions for Carol to stand so that she could fully get Luna's attention and get her to come back straight. We found that most effective was someone else running Luna and Carol standing near the gate as she was coming back so that was our back up plan if she started messing around again! To be honest I don't think we ran that well, Asher certainly wasn't on it and i could tell he wasn't driving back like he has been (I felt pretty bad when I realised he was stiff on his bad leg the next day), Luna made massive improvements, she ran across on 1 leg against Northants but this was quickly rectified.(I must stress if you haven't seen her doing it, it is in no way aggressive and she doesn't run in to/attack the other team dogs, she literally comes through the finish line and veers off in to the other teams runback area level with the opposing dog and then comes back, obviously not ideal and interference in the sense that if the other team had a light they wouldn't be able to rerun but i feel it was a problem we had to work on in the ring because it was the atmosphere causing her to do it) And then she was fine until the last race against High Flyers where she ran across on 1 leg so we swapped to mark realising her and carol by the gate, this worked and after a couple of legs Carol was able to go back to running her and she was great. We lost to Molten and High Flyers, we did a best time of 17.52secs and came 3rd. I've heard some comments on the grapevine about how we've pushed Luna too much and she shouldn't be racing etc but i think people should know the full story before judging on something they know nothing about, I think we've handled the situation pretty well considering the problem started a month prior to this and at Shackerstone it was well on it's way to being fixed! Also people complaining about the amount of people we had in the ring, well I'm sorry but that is down to the judge or the teams we were racing to challenge, I've had just about enough of the bitchiness this year, it does my head in! Sorry about the little rant!

So another eventful show, had great fun on the evenings, Shackerstone really is the best show for the social aspect!