Well, we survived! Headed home from our very first obedience competition. Faith has only taken part in 7 obedience classes so far so I wasn’t expecting any rosettes today thankfully. She was however a joy to be with, she played well, socialised like a butterfly
The first section was play and that went well as I had expected, we dropped 1.5 points but Im guessing that was because she ignored her ‘out’ at the end and wanted to carry on, took her some time to gather herself into a stop.
Second section was heelwork and was pretty disastrous, as soon as we set off she veered off to check out a giant inbuilt heater thing at the side of the ring (ah the joys of gundog noses), it did come together after, towards the end when she remembered what we were supposed to be doing but we dropped 4 points. Cant argue with that for her first time in the environment though.
Finally time for recall, after our slightly wafty heelwork I think our judge was surprised that we were going to be doing our recall off lead! Faith sat and waited really nicely for her recall and I chose a reasonable distance for it but looking back should have chosen nearer as the distance gave her time to build up speed! After zooming towards me a hundred mile an hour she bounced up in front of me full of joy, then got distracted by a smell and veered off to the ring corner. After she finished checking out her distraction she did however finally recall beautifully and even managed a lovely, lovely tight present, really close in and pretty close to being straight and with her head all the way up me and nose into my hands above, but of course as it was after all the sniffing etc the 5 points were already gone.
My conclusion, well we all have to start somewhere! Faith had an awesome time, I loved it, everyone was super friendly and helpful and welcoming and I got to chat with several people who were also doing competition for their first time so all in all a really good morning and I will most certainly be doing more of them!
