Sunny Spring at Shuttleworth

What a lovely weekend it has been at our first 'proper' outdoor show, run by the BSDA of GB up at Shuttleworth college - a lovely setting. It commenced with an early 5am start on Saturday morning but with a pleasant, beautifully sunny and quiet drive up with Kiah and Davy (Yahoo had stayed at home with some friends) - we always find the roads are so much quieter in the morning rather than hitting the end of the rush hour the evening before. So once we got to the show and found our camping spot (which had been kindly saved for us - thank you!) it was time to get into the swing of the show with 4 runs a day.

It didn't start too well for us on the first day with a typical case of good dog... very bad lazy handler, not once but TWICE - on nice flowing courses that really suited Kiah - I forgot to move, both times ending in silly refusals that I could have easily avoided. Anyway more learning and effort required on my part there. The last run of the day was the graded 1-7 BSD agility which was another fab course and so I thought I would try to get it together for Kiah's sake! Well she put in a stonking round to win the class by over 4 seconds, my clever girl, lovely trophy too!

So onwards and upwards from the day before - there were a couple of courses with evil angles which I always think are unnecessary and potentially dangerous, and a slight miscommunication issue about where I wanted Kiah to go (!) - but lots of positives to take out of today with no poles down and some good contacts. It was again the last run of the day that was the gold star for us though - grade 5 jumping was a challenging course with a 'pick the correct end' of the tunnel from a long line of jumps which I would be nowhere near; Kiah and I had agreed that we were just going to have fun and we would accept whatever result that happened! Well when Kiah picked the correct end and I was still lagging behind I thought I'd better get a move on - to then finish with a good clear... though I never thought we would win the class!!!! Two firsts in two days is a brilliant achievement for us, am so pleased! Alex got some brilliant pictures over the weekend, here is my little star Kiah coming over the final jump in her winning round!!