More Catch Up

I hate getting so behind.  I have a class, a trial, and open agility to report on!  I'll save the trial for a separate post with videos and all.  So class and open agility here.

This was a pretty interesting course set up.  I was very happy that Gidget got her tunnel/contact discrimination every time!  I ended up rear crossing all the sequences involving the triple to the tunnel.  A front cross may have been faster but I was concerned about getting in her space after the triple.  If the turn hadn't been as sharp a front cross would have been fine.  The front cross may have still been possible, but I wasn't sure how to pull it off. 

In the first course a lot of my classmates had trouble with the weave entry at 10.  Turns out you have to send your dog out a little to the tire so that the handler has a good line past the wings of the double jump to the imaginary first weave pole.  Gidget and I managed to get the weave entry after watching a few others figure it out, plus Gidget has pretty decent weave entry skills.  After that I did a slight lead out from the weaves (yay for working on independent weaves!) for a front cross after 11.  I did a front cross after 13 too and then a rear cross over 14.  I thought a post turn between 12 and 13 would lead to a wide turn and possibly an off course to the tunnel.  The rear cross gave her a good turn toward the teeter and away from the weaves.  I did a front cross after the teeter just for practice, I still find that move to be awkward, but I didn't do this in the second run.

The second course had one good tricky spot, 8-9.  Getting Gidget to run past the dog walk before turning that direction was tricky and involved good timing.  I had to keep going in the same direction til Gidget was past the dog walk, then I could turn around to get Gidget on my right (front cross) and run for 9.  I was happy how well an "out" command worked to send Gidget to the tunnel.

Open agility had a simple set up which was fine for some general practice.  With Gracie's turns we worked on bottoms (contact behavior) on the dog walk, with a jump and table thrown in.  Gracie managed to remember how to weave the full set of 12 poles.  We also worked on "stop" on the teeter.  She hadn't seen the teeter in a couple weeks and I think the sound scared her more than I expected.  I'll have to remember to reintroduce that carefully when we work the teeter in the future.  She had no issue the last time we worked the teeter, but I have to remember that things change and until she has a solid teeter performance (and even frequently after that) that she needs to remember what the teeter is.

I took a couple different little courses with Gidget.  First we did weave-jump-teeter-table-dog walk-weave.  I mostly wanted to make sure she was back to herself after the trial this past weekend, but we also got a good front cross after the dog walk a couple times.  The other course we did was teeter-table-dog walk-jump-weave.  Just wanted some wrap practice on the jump.  It was a fun little practice overall.