What a weekend

It was our tournament this weekend. It was held in a marquee which was quite a novelty, an indoor tournament on grass, which everyone thought was great. I didn't have quite as early starts as some of our team members but they were still too early for my liking lol. The first job was to direct all the day parkers to their designated parking area. There was an hour or so's delay in starting as the light system decided not to work. Eventually they were sorted and racing got underway. The wind soon started picking up and duties involved making drinks for the ring parties, doing the paperwork and trying to stop everything blowing away in the gales. Two of the gazebo's got wrecked and had to be taken down and the stats tent had to have all its bars reinforced to stop it going the same way. The marquee was well pegged down and was unaffected by the gales so the racing was unaffected. The starters ring outside wasn't faring as well and to prevent any risk to person or dog, it was decided to abandon the racing. The mornings delay mean't everything was running well behind time and so the afternoons racing was run on 'best of 3, run all 3' basis to try and hurry things along. By the time I got home on Saturday night I was shattered and had some food and a drink and went to bed.
Sunday morning started off terrible as I fell back to sleep after the alarm went off and woke up 10 minutes before I needed to pick Toni up. It was literally, dive out of bed, straight into clothes, downstairs, let the dogs in and harness them up, get them in the car and put the foot down haha. Got there and helped with the setting up of another set of lights as Steve's lights from yesterday weren't playing ball lol. I was then frantically summoned to go help out the food van as he was stranded in the sodden ground from all the rain during the night. He unhitched his van and the food trailer was hitched to the disco and I towed it to where it needed to be. I had to tow it back off the field at the end of the day as well. Monty was racing today and between the racing I was doing ring party and drinks duty.
Monty ran great in his races and seems to have stopped the habit he got into of spinning round and going back to the box for another ball after the bellowings he got off Andy at Doncaster. Our team won both the mornings races and the first of the afternoons races. We lost the next race as Keston decided he didn't want to do the hurdles on the way back, Paddy span round and went back down for another go, and Barney & Monty got lights. We lost the last race as well as Barney got lights again. Little Sam did a great job of running Barney and he was only early by the tiniest of margins. Our team came 4th in the division so Monty got another rosette to put on the cage. At one point in the afternoon Storm decided he was going to try and gatecrash the racing but I just managed to catch him as he went into the marquee.
The racing finished bang on schedule and I helped with putting the light system away before presentation. Afterwards our team joined the Tyne Tailwaggers team in the pub for a few drinks (orange for me with me having to drive home).
The only negative thing to come out of the weekend is that it tired me out enough for me to succumb to the cold bug I'd been fighting off for the previous week so I'm now feeling quite poorly. The weekend's success more than makes up for it though.

Just a few pics of Storm at training

Who's a clever little boy

Training today

Had our usual Sunday afternoon training session today. I had Storm out first. He's doing extremely well and did a few full runs in the netting. He does wonderful 4 paw turns on the box with the low hurdle in front. Storm came back out again after some of the other starter dogs did some training and was to have a go at running with Roi, one of Katherine's dogs and Jack, Stefan's dog. Storm ran second dog and had no problems at all with Roi returning and then Jack setting off. Sam decided to see how they'd do if the netting was moved away a little and all 3 dogs ran perfect. The netting was moved further away and again all 3 dogs ran great. They then switched over onto the other lane with no netting and Storm ran absolutely brilliant, I was so proud of my little man. There was one incident where Roi dropped his ball as he came back through the start and Storm grabbed it on his way to the box so when he got there he already had a ball so things went a bit pear shaped. He did return back over the hurdles though. Monty came out for a run a short time after. The other lane had been increased to 8 jumps and he did some runs with Nell, one of Val's dogs. Running over 8 hurdles is testing and soon tires them out. Storm has only had a few training sessions but has picked it up so quickly. He's only 7 month old so must take it steady as we don't want to burn him out before he's even entered his first competition.

The point of all this

Well, I've decided to start this so I can record all our little escapades in the flyball world. I've been doing flyball with my dog Monty since January 2008. He ran in starter comps until he was old enough to run in open comps, his first being Doncaster Bellestars tournament at Cantley Park. It was certainly an interesting first open tournament with rain on the Saturday followed by unbelieveable winds on the Sunday.....oh, and the presence of Carol Thatcher lol. So, from here onwards, I will record all our doings on the flyball circuit.