Stockbridge at Easter 2010

Well this really was an weekend of ups and downs!!! We pulled up at Stockbridge on Friday afternoon to a mud bath!!!! Kim bravely tried to drive onto the field, got 15 feet and stopped!! I stopped in the lane, turned my engine off and waited! lol! After about 10 mins of banter with the Aces and Fantastic 4 while I was waiting for Kim's Van and caravan to be towed away, I unhooked my car and with a little (cough cough) help from the previously mentioned teams I drove onto the field. Tim from the Jets kindly followed pulling my caravan with his 4x4. We just started setting up when we got a phone call from Mary who told us to look at the entrance. They were being pulled by 3 4x4s!!!!! Their massive campervan had got totally stuck and it took 3 of them to pull it on! Show offs! lol!

The racing the next day was fantastic!! We went in with the Express (2nd) team and they just gelled instantly. Its very different in competition to training but we were able to go out and pull off fantastic changeovers from the first race. I saw several people wince at mine hee hee!! The team were absolutely flying! We lost the first leg of the first race as the ball rolled out of the box and China did the wall of death around the ring at top whippet speed! We lost that one on interference :os! On the 2nd leg we did a cracking run and won! Yeay!! We were then told that we had run 21.10 our breakout time was 21.00 Arghhhh! Tooo close!! We pulled back a little and won the third leg!! We had won our first race!! Its a bit of a blur after that! On one leg I got a light and sent Fly up as fifth dog as the other team had a light too but Soph (her first time box loading - bless her) didn't realise that she needed to put another ball in! She saw Fly coming back as I shouted to her to put another ball in. Soph span round, grabbed a ball, loaded the box and stood up just as Fly got to the box. She had done it so fast I barely believed that she had done it!!! We also broke out once too but the long and short of it was that we won our division!!! Wow what a first competition!!!

The downside was that the rest of the competition was cancelled due to the horrendous ground conditions :( so we never got to run our top team and multibreed teams. Oh well never mind!!

Some Spectators

The entrance to the show ground

The Showground

Rick and Mary being towed off!

It was a really nice weekend all in all though and although I was very disapointed that the show had to be cancelled (although I totally understand why) I was very pleased with the way we ran and the support we got from the other teams. Its always a bit nerve racking running with a new team but it was really nice and on the whole people are very supportive. I did however get a couple of jokes about which team I had my eye on to run with next! lol!!! Cheeky people!!

Stockbridge at Easter

I have just got back from a fantastic weekend in Hampshire but goodness am I tired!! I think we all decided that perhaps it was a bit silly to do our own show then three days later do a four day show!! :)
Friday was starters which started disastrously when Kate twisted her bad knee whilst running Boston. She has a cruciate injury and her knee just gave way. She was carried out of the ring and we decided not to race for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon Dave took over Boston and I ran Stacey, Boston's sister. Stacey had been eyeballing the other team and then running across the lane in the morning so I calmly held my hand over her eyes and then let her go. She ran like a dream! I have told Dave that he can't run her any more LOL!! Kate went to A&E and came back several hours later with her leg in plaster from hip to ankle oops.
On Saturday the Mad Muttleys (Jamie's team) ran. Sam had to run Lily as Kate couldn't. Lily was not right all day and I could not get my changeovers right, this is really unusual. We were rather outclassed in the division but we ran our fastest ever time of 21.47 and Jamie ran a stonking time of 4.36 in the wet! This was the fastest time that any of our dogs did all weekend not bad for a Beardie, LOL. Then at presentation I was presented with Jamie's Graduate and Neo's Advanced in beautiful silver frames. Ahhh!
Sunday was our top team's turn in Div 2, We were the Cannon fodder!!! Poor Fly really struggled with her arthritis and was very stiff when she got up this morning. I warmed her up for about half an hour and massaged her legs which really helped but she didn't really run right all day. She did not like the slippery ground and didn't run faster then 4.60 secs all day, which is really slow for her. She was start dog and these are a new set of lights which meant that there were loads of false starts and she had to run lots. She was exhausted bless her! We made the decision at the end of the day to put her down to the second team for the next show where she can run anchor dog (her favourite position) and interchange her with another dog so she doesn't have to run all day. This is a really hard thing to do as she was my first flyball dog and a superb dog in her day. She was easily one of the fastest and most reliable start dogs in the country. Its such a shame when you start to see them get old. :(
Monday was multibreed. Jamie ran with Lily, Taff and Poppit. We did really well and came second, only loosing to a team that was a second and a half faster then us! So we were really pleased with our time of 19.36 secs.
All in all it was weekend of mixed results but a good one at that!