Rachel and Cessy

This weekend, me and BC dog competed in a trial. Saturday was a disaster, today was a lot better. 0 for Q today, because his handler was an idiot and made the same mistake twice on a rear cross. A rear cross is when I change directions left to right behind the dog - this is not something I do with Chelsie, as I am always ahead of her and cross in front of her. The timing is totally different and something I am not used to.

The first time I screwed up, I had good reason..if I missed, we were for sure doomed, as he probably would have gone into an off course tunnel staring him in the face - it is important to note that the dogs were approaching a very tight sequence of obstacles with a tremendous amount of speed...I cut the angle too close and sent him right by the jump. Fast forwad to jumpers...same opportunity, only no off course out there - I thought, great! I can fix it - this is a good course for him, we will get past this and be good...wrong. Praise the dog, slap the handler...

Anyway, about Rachel and Cessy. Rachel is in 5th grade and trains her Samoyed Cessy (a big fluffy white dog) at our club. I first saw Rachel and Cessy about 2 summers ago, at one of our NADAC trials. These trials are less intense than AKC and great for jr handlers. My first show with Chelsie was a NADAC show. Anyway, it was on dirt, and Cessy found a stick and became obsessed with it. It was obvious Cessy had zero intention of doing anything but getting that stick. So the judge walked over, got the stick and gave it to Rachel and let her run the course with a stick in her hand - a big no-no. But Rachel and Cessy finished, quite well actually all things considered.

This weekend, in her second AKC trial, Rachel and Cessy completed their novice titles and moved into open. They got their novice jumpers title yesterday and competed in open jumpers today, and in one of the last runs of the trial this afternoon, they got their standard novice title - and there were some tough obstacles out there, primarily a horrendous weave pole entry off the A frame and a horrendous angle on jump 13 going out. A lot of dogs ran by jump 14 because of the angle. But it was great to see them finish - yesterday, they did the only thing they could have done not to qualify and that was knock a bar. The standard ring was the ring I was course building in, so I saw it all.

We were all so happy for this little girl. She is one patient kid and has worked so hard with this dog. She trains in the class before me on Wednesday nights, and it is obvious that she has stuck with and kept on going - Cessy is not an easy dog to train. It was great to be able to see her reap the benefits of 2 years of hard work. Not only did the dog qualify, she was 21 seconds under standard course time - the look on her face when her mom told her that was priceless.

Made it all worth it to be there close to 2 hrs after the other ring was done and gone home. :)