Absolutely brilliant day! Couldn’t recommend it enough!
Arrived and parked up, sorted our bag out for the day and awaited the arrival of Faiths sister Dottie. Was lovely to have both girls on the day and Faith squeaked happily at Dotties crate as soon as we went over, girls said their hello then we headed off to hear the briefing and group allocation. We had Hari Lampart training us for the day and what a grand job she did!
It was a nicely balanced group intermediate with only 1 moving up to a more challenging one later in the day. We nearly all had similar issues so that lent itself well to the day. Our trainer Hari was adept at balancing challenging everyone without pushing anyone too far and also at ensuring successful outcomes each time for each dog.
Dottie and Faith both needed to work on confidence with different entries and we were lucky enough to be able to use several new entrances throughout the day. Both girls really seemed to enjoy their day from start to end and both progressed significantly.
We built a nice path through to our last more complicated retrieves with each go moving something forward for them:
- Short seen retrieve ensuring dog was sent as soon as dummy hit the water
- Longer version of the above
- Longer still version of the above
- Now as confidence had grown, we asked the dogs to wait off lead with us to one side until they were given the commence to retrieve
- Next they were sent from further back from the entrance
- We then sent them in for a retrieve and threw a second as they were swimming back, the purpose being to call them back with the first then ask them to sit up and send them for the second once ready
- By the end of the day our last exercise was to see a water thrown then a land one thrown and ask them to do the land retrieve first then set them up and send for the water retrieve and on return be waiting half way down the field for them to run in and deliver to hand.
The day was a brilliant success and I just hope now Faith can remember just how much fun she had when we hopefully do our water at this year first working test later in the year!
