Sunday, October 20, 2002

 
It's been awhile, and a lot has happened, Phyl-wise. Here are the highlights:

• We attended a Bobby Dalziel clinic at Verma Krammes's place in Virginia, which I'd signed up for a full eight months ago. It was a little anticlimactic. Bobby bred Phyl, and I had romantic visions of the breeding that produced her being the culmination of his breeding program; I was half-sure that he'd be able to tell me all sorts of stories about why he chose that particular cross, and what the characteristics of her brothers and sisters were. (The breeding that produced Phyl--Bobby's Jim to Bobby's Gael was repeated at least three times). It didn't turn out that way; it seems Gael (although a full sister to Bobby's Cap) is his daughter's dog and isn't really worked on sheep much. So it wasn't any sort of grand culmination breeding at all; it was obviously a marriage of convenience at best. :-) But at least Bobby liked Phyl, which was nice. We spent most of our time working on the top of her outrun, which is tight more often than it's correct.
  
• Phyl and I entered the Ranch class at Edgeworth, which Bobby judged. It didn't go very well; everything felt raggedy and wild, and (to add to the pain of it all) the person before me wound the gate rope so tightly that it took me a full thirty seconds to figure out how to unwind it. It wasn't a performance to be proud of at all, and we certainly didn't come close to placing.
  
• This weekend I entered my first Open trial with Phyl, a little trial in Rhinebeck, NY. The trial itself was extremely pleasant and well-run by Warren and Maria Mick, using Pat Canaday's sheep. The field was small (the outrun couldn't have been more than 150 yards), but we did pretty badly: missed the fetch gates both days, had good driveaways but lousy crossdrives, and hadn't a clue how even to stop the sheep in the shedding ring, much less how to do a shed. It was depressing, but I guess there's nowhere to go from there but up!
  

We have a trial coming up next week, another Open trial in Old Chatham, NY. Bobby Dalziel will be judging again. This week I'm going to work on three things: (1) the top of Phyl's outrun and her lift; (2) getting her to flank wide and fast (if necessary) on the fetch; and (3) going smoothly and correctly from the drive into the crossdrive, a problem which has consistently plagued us in our last bunch of trials. Since Old Chatham is run to standard, all I want to be able to do is to finish the course. Keep fingers crossed for me!

posted by Heather Nadelman