BevLive: Slash J, Nursery Day

A most amazing day. Gorgeous, perfect weather, sunny slight breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Today we ran the Nursery and ranch. Nel and I spent about three hours spotting sheep at the beginning of the trial. Great experience for us both. Sure got Nel over her horse concerns. By the time we finished she was all but walking under Tom's very good-natured gelding.

I ran Meg in the Nursery. The course was basically the same as the open with a little modification to the drive and the outrun brought in to about 400 yards. We ran on four sheep and whether because of the extra sheep or the extra day of running they were little darlings.Perfect for the youngsters. Amanda judged.

This turned out to be too big a course for all but a very small number of the youngsters. Many never got out to the sheep at all and a good number of the ones that did lost control of themselves on the fetch.Dennis Edwards and Boone made it look very doable winning the class.

Meg made it look very hard. She again didn't finish her outrun stopping at 9:00. I don't know if this is the people or the horse or some horrible regression in our training. Since she doesn't really know her sides we never recovered from her off line lift. But she listened, stopping every time I told her to. She never lost her head and brought me the sheep like a good girl. We had a pretty good drive going but just as we got to the second drive she made a critical wrong guess on a flank command and we had a big miss. The pen was very ragged but we got them in the end. This was the first time she ever put sheep in a pen. I wonder if she learned anything. All of the effort garnered us a 43 and as it turned out 4th place and our first qualifying leg for the Nursery Finals since there were over 20 Nursery dogs running. Way to go Meg.

We finished running at about 1:00 and all packed up and drove the 20 miles to the Kerr Ranch for our next competition. This is easily one if the best trial fields I have ever seen. It'sbeautiful and really challenging. Because of the large entry this year the post has been moved up some reducing the outrun from last year's 900 yards to about 800 yards.

"The Big One". Setout is between the biggest hill and the little one just down from the horizon line.

I just got back from walking the dogs up one of the surrounding buttes. Great view of most of North Dakota. It's very scary walking dogs here. There are sheep turned out in the same thousand acre field as the campers. I'm scared to death one of my youngsters will get into the sheep and get us all thrown out of this dog trialer's paradise.

Rene Labrie in the blue explaining the course.

Handlers meeting at 6:00. We will be running late as there are almost 70 dogs and it's a 12 minute course. I suspect we will be running to a standard before the day is out.