FAIR VIEW FARM, HANTS. Easter 2009

The weekends racing was full of ups and downs!

On Sunday The Swifts were racing. We had Ollie, Kes, Loki, Ice and Lottie in the team and were seeded 6th in division 4.

It was Ices’ first tournament outside and being very young still, he was a bit overwhelmed by it all and kept putting his “stupid” head on!! It didn’t help matters that poor Rita who was running Kes was at her first tournament and got completely overtaken by nerves, which Kes picked up on and used this to wind Ice up – which made things even worse!!

The weather wasn’t that nice and drizzled all morning, which upset Lottie as she does not like wet mud to run on. The lights used had screens which showed the individual dogs times and Lottie was running 6.9s all day – which is very slow!!! We did a 19.88 and I wonder what time we would have posted if Lottie had been running the times she did the next day on dry ground!!!!

Despite all the problems, Ice got his act together in the afternoon and we ended up in 3rd place, which was a nice surprise.


On Sunday we had a team in the Multibreed which consisted of Jake (BC), Merlin (ESS), Grace (POINTER), Lottie (JRT) and Loki (BC) as reserve in case Jake, who was at his first show, got overwhelmed.

A phone call on Saturday to say that Merlin wasn’t well meant that Sunday was spent trying to find another dog. Which we got in the shape of a lab cross collie called Kelpi from the Bassett Allsorts.

By Monday, Merlin was much better, so we ran him for the first leg of each race, which worked well for him. Jake wouldn’t come back over the first jump from the box until we discovered his agility jump command, which Kim (who was boxloading) practiced till she sounded just like Pennie. This made the difference and in the last race of the day, Jake got it right.
Lottie was much happier as the weather was much better and the ground was drier and every time I remembered to look at the times, she was running 6.09!!

The team came 4th from 6th seed. So, it was in all, a fantastic weekend. Our next show is in three weeks at the same venue.