Friday, November 05, 2004

In which we present a tale of three trials

 
Trials seem to be happening a lot faster than I can write about them, even when I have the best of intentions to keep up a fresh and interesting blog. Shocking as it is, Phyl and I have been in three trials since I last updated the blog--and that was only three weeks ago! And even off the trial field, things are happening quickly: we have a ram in to breed to our Shetland ewes, which means that the whole lamb experience (in all of its pain and glory) will most likely be happening again in a few short months. We have a few new sheep that we think will be slower and steadier for training young dogs (eventually I should have a puppy from Phyl to try training, and Sally has a young dog that she’s bringing along now). And Phyl is just out of season, which suddenly means that I’m going to be breeding her during her very next season, not at some distant time in a hypothetical future. So I’m either going to have to update the blog more frequently or curl up in a fetal-position ball and never get out of bed.

ABC Magazine Trial

Lena Baily’s ABC Magazine trial was quite an enjoyable event, despite the fact that Phyl worked less well there than she had at the previous two trials. The trial took place at Stu Ligon’s Seclusival Farm, but on a different field from the field that Lena had used last year. This field was fairly tricky for dogs like Phyl with inconsistent outruns: it was hilly, and seemed to be more narrow at the top than at the bottom. It’s the sort of field that would have caused Phyl to stop in confusion on last year, when she was at the height of her outrun problems. She’s gotten much better over the last year, but her outruns on this field were still much too tight, even though she never thought about stopping. (It was a little disappointing, after seeing her do such nice outruns at Edgeworth, but I’ve given up trying to figure out any rhyme or reason behind Phyl’s outruns. I’m just glad they’re tending to get better rather than worse.) Her fetches also weren’t very good at this trial on either day (another disappointment after her much nicer, much longer fetches at Edgeworth): there was a lot of pressure to her right on the fetch, which has always been a weak point for her. The first day her fetch was very offline, even though I made ever effort to get her around to stop the sheep, and the second day she actually lost them to the exhaust and we had to abort our run without even attempting the drive. *Sigh*. But the weather was great, and Lena had a very nice steak dinner for everyone on Saturday night, which made things seem better than they actually were. I stayed over until Monday to have a lesson with Alasdair MacRae. For a mere $120, I had the pleasure of learning that I handle too jerkily and aggressively, that Phyl isn’t shedding even when I think she is (she’s actually “driving”), and that her flanks close at hand (at the pen and the shed) are horrendous. *Sigh* again. (Lessons are sort of like Calvinism, where people volunteer to be told that they’re lowly worms with little hope of improving unless they sign up for even more demoralizing flogging.) So it was long drive back to New Jersey (and yes, I turned north instead of south this time!), with a lot to reflect upon.

Butternut Creek Sheepdog Trial

I drove home from Virginia on Monday, and on Friday I turned around again and drove another six hours, this time north rather than south. The drive was much easier than the drive to Virginia had been: good scenery, no cities to speak of, and this time I had company, since Sally was able to drive with me. I’m getting very blase about crossing the border these days, and I almost never think about all the scary spy movies in which people try to cross borders and are never heard from again. Now I just hand over my driver’s license, explain that yes, we’re carrying four dogs to a sheepdog trial, and barely tremble at all. Sally and I stayed in Amanda’s bunkhouse, and it really doesn’t get much better than that: it’s a charming little house right in the woods, so when you wake up you’re surrounded by trees and natural beauty. When I’m there, I can almost see why Thoreau went to the woods, even though I’d personally only do that if I could take along a good DSL line, satellite dish, and (of course) my beloved TiVo! Amanda’s trial itself was wonderful, one of the best farm trials that I’ve ever attended. The field was one that she doesn’t use for pasturing sheep, so pressure wasn’t a huge issue. The outrun was large (about 425 yards), and the sheep that we used were completely undogged lambs who had no clear idea about how to respond to dogs. It all made for a very challenging, very interesting trial. Phyl did fine outruns both days, and I was very proud of her. (Even though the Edgeworth outrun was longer, the flatness of this field made it appear that the sheep were even farther away. It was amazing to see Phyl out there like a little speck somewhere in the distance, bringing her sheep to me.) Phyl’s biggest problem at this trial was her fetch: both days she let them slip too much to her right (just as she had at Lena’s the week before), and as a result we had very low fetch scores. But her outrun and lift were fine, and her drive was passable the first day and considerably better the second. (The lambs were very hard to grab hold of and push nicely, and I only managed to do it at all fluidly on the second day.) But we had a completed run the first day (which included a split, a pen, and then a single), and the second day (which was just a split and then a pen) we got our split but had time run out seconds before the sheep started to walk into the pen. (And pens weren’t automatic at all, so I was pleased that we got it, even though it didn’t count for points.) We didn’t place, but Phyl worked well, looked good handling the lambs, and we would have placed if things had been only a very little bit different. I wasn’t at all disappointed by how it went. And the highlight of the trial (besides the fun of staying in the bunkhouse) was the marvelous dinner that Amanda prepared on Saturday night: really good pork roast with a raisin stuffing, kale, squash, roasted fingerling potatoes, good wine, and chocolate squares, lemon squares, and homemade macaroons for dessert. Amanda is a fantastic cook and a wonderful hostess, and anyone who has a chance to go to this trial should do so.

Nation Valley Sheepdog Trial

On impulse, Sally and I decided to go back to Canada for Werner Reitboeck’s Nation Valley trial the weekend after Butternut Creek: we hadn’t entered, but Amanda wrote and offered the use of her bunkhouse again, and that’s always a hard offer to resist. So off we went, crossing the border even more casually than we had the week before. And (drum roll here!) . . . we placed! We were third! We earned 2.8 USBCHA points!! (And, for those of you keeping track--yes, those were my very first USBCHA points, my second time earning money, and my third Open placement.) Needless to say, I was very, very happy. Phyl ran out well and got a 20-10 on her outrun and lift (and the judge--Sandy Beaton, who actually remembered Phyl when she was a nursery dog in Yorkshire--didn’t give out many of those). Her fetch was beautiful (a big relief after all the lousy fetches that she’d been doing at the last couple of trials), and she got an 18 on it. She ended up with a 23 on her drive (good driveaway, made both panels, good return to the shedding ring on the last leg, but the crossdrive line itself was a little ragged), a 5 on her split (I was glad to get it at all, since it’s definitely my weak point right now, but it definitely would have been a split that Alasdair would have called “driving” rather than actually coming in decisively into a hole and taking control), and a 10 on her pen. We were supposed to do a single after the pen, but we just couldn’t get it done. (Interestingly, if the trial had been a split and then a pen without the single, as it was the following day, we would have won the trial. It’s interesting how these things work.) We ended up with an 86, a nice ribbon, some attractive Canadian money ($120 Canadian dollars, which translated into $95.24 American dollars when I converted it at the border), and a very warm feeling about Canada. We went to a nice Thai/Cambodian restaurant in Kingston that night, which seemed like the perfect way to celebrate. The next day, of course, our run was much less good: tight outrun, crooked lift (15-7), decent fetchline but we managed to lose our sheep to the wrong side of the post before we turned (so it ended up as an 11), missed both panels on the drive (the first I turned way too early, even though Phyl had the sheep marching nicely toward the drive panels on a perfect line--I’m practically a blind person--and the second because I, along with many other people, just couldn’t see the crossdrive line. And we never got our split, so of course we never got to attempt the pen. I think our total score was a 46, a long way off from the 86 of the day before. But I didn’t care--one good run is more than I can hope for in any single weekend. Vive le Canada!


posted by Heather Nadelman