Barbury Castle

Well, this certainly was an eventful weekend!! As it was Nat's birthday and not too far away we decided to take the caravan - after attempting to leave numerous times (very long story) we arrived at about half 9 Friday night. The venue was lovely, a lovely big camping field and massive exercise area, it was just such a shame the ring was 1.25miles from it!!!

Saturday was a quiet day for us in terms of racing, just the missiles in division 7 who did well and came 4th. Nat and I went for a wander round the show with Asher and Jem which, after deciding to walk there (we didn't realise quite HOW far it was!!), turned about to be a 2 and a half hour wander!!! We then had a lovely 4hr nap in the afternoon to make up for our lack of sleep Fri night and our expected lack of sleep Sat night!! Elliot & Laika then had a nice walk round the point to point course before we cooked tea - the second eventful thing for our weekend - our caravan nearly set on fire, someone came to chat to us when there was a loud bang and apparently flames coming out our water heater!! After turning off our gas Carol & Mark kindly lent us their cooker for us to finish cooking our tea before we headed out to celebrate Nat's birthday :)

Sunday was manic, with three teams in three of the four divisions! With the ring so far away from the caravan we didn't manage to get back at all during the day but luckily we had taken money so could buy lunch at the show! The ground was running really slow and consequently none of the dogs ran their best. Extraset managed a best time of 19.09 and won division 3 - I was naughty in the afternoon and didn't move Jem far enough away from the rings to stop her barking between races and so she was noticeably slower in the second race. Apart from that she ran really well, although probably spent very little time looking where she was going!!! Rockets only managed a best time of 18.33 and finished 2nd - they had won all their races until the last one, but so had that team, it was brilliant close racing and we took it to five legs, loosing the last leg on 0.08s!!! Elliot was being a prat for some reason and really would not stand still so my changeovers were quite late as I couldn't judge what he was going to do, or even look at where Merlin was as he was being such a fidget!! I did realise on one of the races that some of the confusion may have been that when Carol calls Merlin she calls "merleeeeee" which of course sounds very much like "eeeeeeee" and when she didn't call Merlin till I had released Elliot he stood stock still. As this wasn't a very practical solution I then ended up just having to lift Elliot over into position and only put him down just before I let him go - worked OK but it is not something I want to have to do all the time!! I tried him coming back to a second ball and it didn't seem to make much difference to his time, he was maybe a fraction quicker to start with but he soon decided not to spit the first ball for the second and so just kept getting hit on the head with it!! I have therefore decided to go back to the tug, work with what I have got for now and then work better on improving it over the winter.

I shall leave you to read Nat's blog for how Asher got on in his first run back after his injury (when she gets round to writing it!:p) but will say that Ballistics managed another new best time of 16.63 :)