Kilties first show-

I got brave and entered Kiltie in her first champ show, probably too early, but I wanted to gauge where we were with her training. The show was at Kapiti, just a small show with one ring.

We'd just entered Starters, and I was going to enter jumpers with weave as well, this could be done on the day. We run a starters class here in NZ, it's a easy jumpers with weave course. There's no contact equipment and usually no more than 1 trap.

The course was nice, I did a lead out to the tunnel, no problems. Kapiti's tyre is different from any other tye in our area, it hangs from chains. Kiltie figured it wasn't a tyre and kept running past it. So we after 2 attempts we carried on and took the "D". The jumps to the weave and on to another jump was fine, at that stage Keltie left me to jump the long jump side ways and carry on to a off-course jump about 15 metres away. I got her back and completed the course OK. Not bad for her first effort! At the end of the class the Kapiti guys left the tyre up for us, so we practiced that and it was OK after a couple of tries (there was about 6 of cueing up for this).

Next was Intermediate, it was a course that started difficult, then opened up to a flowing finish. Some people lead out to the down contact of the A-Frame on the left of the A-Frame, then took the jump and did a rear cross on the up ramp of the cross-over. This worked OK, but there was a couple of dogs that ran past the A-Frame and took the flexi tunnel on the right hand side of the A-Frame. Some other handlers took the right hand side of the A-Frame and sent their dog onto the cross over staying on the other side of jumps 3 and 5. A few dogs took the off course jump 1 after the A-Frame for the second time, but not as many as I thought might. Most handlers took the outside of the tunnel and did a rear cross at 8. The next problem was the angle onto the cross over from jump # 10. But this seemed to pose no real problems, even for the large, fast huntaways. A few dogs had trouble with the weave, it had orange poles and was close to the fence. And a couple of handlers struggled to keep up with their dogs which resulted in spinning at the tyre or pulled them off it entirely. It was a fast course, with the winner getting 30.774 seconds.

Then came Senior, which was brilliant! It had a ton of jumps, it was really tight. Most handlers had dogs knocking jump # 10, the first part of a threadle. Quite a few dogs also finished on Jump #1 instead of 20 when the handler did a pull through that ended up pointing their dog straight at # 1 instead of # 20. The winning time was 40.0 sec, but their were some pretty fast times with 5 faults.

I guess the one thing I got from the day was that I needed to go home and do some more "agility heelwork" on the flat with Kiltie.