BevLive: The Finals, Day One

The biggest event today was the news that Amanda had found Roz, or rather that Roz had found Amanda. Everyone here was very worried. There was a constant quest for information all day that finally ended around 3:00 with the good news.

Running started at noon today. Alison and I missed the 11:00 handler's meeting as we had gone to Newel to work our dogs a bit. The practice wasn't a huge success, but I at least left feeling I had made the right choice to run Hemp, who was working really well.

I spent a couple of hours exhausting sheep with Mirk. The fresh range ewes were very suspicious of the exit off the field, and sometimes getting the used sheep off took almost as long as the run. Mirk did a great job. He had multiple groups giving him the evil eye, and he only lost his cool once. I thought he was wonderful . . . but of course I thought that before he exhausted, too.

Herbert ran this afternoon and had a not-great run, but he finished.Which given these sheep is very difficult. He got 112 combined score from the two judges and was sitting 5th behind the top score of 148 after the 24th run, when we stopped for the day. The running improved as evening approached and it cooled a little. It was pretty warm on the field for most of the afternoon and the sheep were very cranky.Several dogs got stood off and had one ewe split off and run away. The low scores reflect the difficulty with just keeping the sheep on the field and moving, let alone getting the obstacles. I think it will be necessary to finish the course (in other words, get the pen) in order to get a high enough score to make the semi-finals.

I run sixth in the morning with Hemp. I'm hoping the sheep won't be quite so difficult when it's cooler. Course this didn't work out at Meeker, but who but a great optimist would keep doing this anyway?

Amanda hasn't arrived here yet, so I don't have the full report on her adventures. It's hard to drive as many miles as we all do in this sport without having an occasional travel adventure, much as we all try to avoid them. I think this one had as good an ending as one could hope.