Sunday, July 11, 2004

In which we catch up

 
I've been very remiss lately. I have no excuse; I can't even plead blogger burnout, since I don't post nearly enough to be burned out. Anyway, enough of my apologies; here I am at last. The upshot is that things are better since my low point of the Bluegrass. Phyl recovered from whatever-it-was that ailed her: her energy level and her appetite are completely back to normal. We've been in two trials since I last posted: Steppingstone in Maryland, which was unremarkable for us: it was neither the best of times nor the worst of times. But our BIG adventure was a trip to Canada two weeks later to attend Viki Kidd's Country Heritage Park trial.

And it was truly a big adventure, particularly since I hadn't been to Canada since my fargone teen years. Sally and I drove up together in a packed-to-the-gills Edgar (who, by the way, these days is sporting vanity plates of LTLHATS. Am I getting over the top or what?). The best thing about the trip was the fact that we were invited to work sheep at Amanda Milliken's place the day before and the day after the weekend trial, which was simply glorious: she has an amazing farm, and Phyl and I got to try things that we've never done before, like gathering 300-plus sheep and then walking them through a foot bath. It was a little hard to come back to our little almost-eight-acre field and small group of sheep, but it was great to be able to glimpse the life of real sheepdogs through a glass darkly.

So . . . the trial itself. Cutting to the end of the story for the impatient: we placed the first day! We were a nice, respectable fifth. The entry was small, so we just missed getting USBCHA points by virtue of a tie that was broken on outwork (that is, Phyl was tied with one of Amanda's dogs, but Amanda's dog had better outwork than we did--big surprise, that!). The longer story is this. Country Heritage Park is a very interesting trial just outside of Toronto. The field is small, but it's very unusual: it's in a bowl, and there are a lot of peculiar visual obstacles. Here's a picture:

As you can see, there's a funny industrial-looking thing on the left side of the outrun. Although dogs could go around it, none of them actually did. So there were a lot of "creative" outruns, and I was quite sure that Phyl was going to mess up royally. Oddly, she didn't: the first day she was tight but respectable, and the second day she did a beautiful, big outrun (one of the best I've ever seen her do in a trial). But the field wasn't the only challenge of the trial: the sheep were very tough: undogged, mostly Suffolk crosses, and very irritated at having to be pushed around a course in the summer sun. A few sheep really went for the dogs. Phyl and I were lucky enough to get a nice draw for our first run, and she just handled them beautifully: I never felt that the sheep weren't under her control. We missed the crossdrive panels--it was my handling, not Phyl--and got a pretty good pen. I had some trouble at the shed--and that was Phyl, not me--because she didn't come in until the third attempt, and we had two nice big holes before that. Still, it was a good enough run to place, and I consider it my first real Open placement. We won some pretty Canadian money, which I promptly spent in Canada.

The second day started out even better, but finished with a thud: Phyl did a killer outrun and had a nice lift. The setout person lost our sheep, but Phyl brought them back on line very quickly for a really beautiful fetch. She had a somewhat odd look on her face as she fetched the sheep to me, which should have been my tipoff that things weren't as rosy and easy as they appeared. Sure enough, as we got to the post the big lead Suffolk ewe broke hard for the exhaust, and I was a beat too late in urging Phyl to catch her. She lost her into the exhaust, caught the other two, but that was the end of our run. Kind of anticlimactic, but since I was pretty sure that TWO good ones in a single weekend was a flat-out impossibility, I wasn't really disappointed.

Since the trial I've been working like crazy on shedding. Sally thought that the problem with our botched shedding attempts was the fact that Phyl's attention was always focused on the escaping sheep and not on the task at hand. She thought that I needed to get Phyl's attention before calling her in. I think this may well be the best shedding advice that anyone has ever given me, and I've been experimenting it with a lot. I've been trying first to call her name, make sure she's looking at me, and then asking her in. That's working well, but of course it requires big holes and sheep that aren't trying to regroup. Now I'm trying to move into calling her name, whipping my arm down, and then calling her in; soon I'm going to move to whipping my arm down, calling her name, and calling her in, and then ultimately I want just to whip my arm down and call her in more or less simultaneously. But I'm really encouraged. I think Sally might have pinpointed our missing shedding link! :-)

So that's all for now. I promise I'll be better about keeping everyone posted (although by now "everyone" probably consists of the Google robots who crawl the web to index it!). My next trials will also be in Canada: I've actually gone and entered Werner's Nation Valley, Jim and Joanne Murphy's Ewesful Acres, and Amanda's Grass Creek Park trials. I'm officially an international globetrotter!


posted by Heather Nadelman