BevLive: all over but the shouting

Rained all night. Very unusual here. Got up to a rainy, cold, overcast day. Handlers meeting at 8:00. Normal sort of course, with the exception of the "dumbed down" shed. The two lots of sheep are eight ewes each for a total of sixteen sheep. Eight of the sheep are collared; at the shed the handler must retain and pen the regular five ewes. The extra three collared ewes are to make this task simpler and to increase the number of handlers who finish. The greater number of finished runs hopefully increase the satisfaction of the large, paying audience. Since almost all the hands shed and more than half penned, it clearly did allow more handlers to finish, even if the handlers miss the chance to try their skills in a true international shed.

The first outrun  was to the right on a section of the mountainside we had not previously used. The turnback was left, up to where the sheep had been held for all the preliminary rounds. All of the sheep were well spotted and where they needed to be on time. It was a very smoothly run final, just as you would expect from a trial as well organized as Soldier Hollow.

The running began at 9:00 with a completed run by first timer Lana Rowley. Faansie Basoon had a good morning run and held first place until Bill and I ran eighth and topped him by a bare 2 pts. 

Our place at the top of the leader board was of short duration, as Scott Glen and Pleat had a smoking run that ultimately and very deservedly won. Amanda's late run with Ethel was very good up to the second drive gate, where she ran into some trouble. She had a strong finish though and just barely missed edging Faansie and me out, ending up fourth.

 I'm giving up ducks, though. My romance with duck herding ended when both Huck and Hemp failed to get into the prizes. Clearly I'm too old to learn a whole new sport, and I'll stick with the one I know.

The weather cleared in the afternoon, so although attendance was much lower than the norm there were still thousands of fans for the very nice medals ceremony that closes the trial.

A bunch of us went out for Mexican. I'm back in the camper now, dogs all walked and ready for a good long sleep before driving to Meeker in the morning.

Amanda, who has fully entered into the blog spirit of things, took a ton of photos of the day's events and has sent them to Heather at no small inconvenience, as she had some difficulty in finding a computer to dump them to the Internet. They give a real feel of this great trial.