AAC Regionals

Well, Hope and I competed in our first ever AAC agility regional championships this weekend in Sherwood Park AB. Started out with Steeplechase on Friday. Hope had some issues with the weave poles in the first run and ended up being over time. Second run went much better. Started the regionals on Saturday morning with a clean run on a fairly tough standard course. Second run was gamblers, with a really tough gamble. The gamble started with a pinwheel away from the handler to a layered set of 6 weaves (there were 2 sets of 6 weave poles and you were supposed to send to the outer set). Well, we didn't get the main gamble but she did get a 14 point mini gamble that was also very tricky (U-shaped tunnel around the dogwalk, had to take either a tunnel and then wrap tight up the dogwalk or take the dogwalk and then the tunnel. She unfortunately missed out on a bunch of points due to some shifty-looking (to her, anyway) people by the back fence. Third run was jumpers and she did a good job on another tough course. Had a couple of refusals and some time faults but overall a pretty good day.

Second day started out with gamblers and we would have gotten a lot more points if I didn't step over the line on the mini gamble. Didn't get the main gamble again, but more from handler error than dog error (as usual). Second run was a nice, twisty-turny jumpers course and another clean run! She needed about 50 points in her last standard run Sunday to qualify. Tough course, involving a straight tunnel and then a 90-degree turn into 12 weaves (Hope's current nemesis). She ended up with one refusal (for some reason she elected to not take a jump right in front of her) but did get the trickiest parts of the course. So overall we ended up with nearly 400 points in our first ever regionals. Considering this was about our 8th agility trial in our career, I am thrilled!