Friday, November 5, 2010

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Seems like it's been ages since I blogged about trialling dogs. Well, today I've got a good one.

We took the whole family out to Lloydminster yesterday for the Stockade Roundup trial, where we met up with a good chunk of Travis's family (he's yet another Saskatchewan expat). I threw Kate in for kicks to see what she'd think of arena trials.  The arena was small and the courses complicated - the first one looked like cat's cradle...and there were no retries...and there was a judged pen...what the heck? Not exactly what I had thought Kate's first arena trial would be like at all but she surprised me by handling it like a pro, laying down two very solid runs, suffering from handler error on the first run and a ewe that really insisted that she shouldn't be penned on the second (Kate insisted that she WOULD BE penned and the ewe finally admitted defeat).

Hope and I were first to the post and the guinea pigs for the crazy courses. I managed to lose a few points on the first go around trying to make up my mind which way we were supposed to take the sheep around the second barrel  -leftorrightleftorrightleftorightcraplefttoolate-but beyond that we had two nice rounds and made it to the finals.  Hope and I had the good fortune to go first and run a clean round with a time of 1:14.  Congratulations to the other finalists Peter Gonnet in second, Jamie VanRhyn in third, Jeff DMarni in fourth, and Judy Finseth in fifth.


Along with a swishy new collar and the usual pay out Hope won us our first calcutta - the good people of Lloydminster like to gamble! Atta boy Hopey for bringing home the kibble!



We're taking a couple of days off to hang out with Travis's family in Saskatchewan and then we'll be off to Farmfair in Edmonton for more fun.

3 comments:

Karen Ramstead said...

WAHOO!!! Congratulations to you both from your friends across the valley!!

YEAH!!!

Handhills Border Collies said...

well done!!!!!

Camp said...

that's terrific! congratulations!!