On Wednesday I ended up taking Jedi & Secret up to The Dog Tank for some midweek practice time. I was mostly going to see if Secret would jump outside of the competition (she did), but Jedi is always game for more pool time. We were the only ones there -- apparently for the entire day! -- so both of them got plenty of time in the pool. Jedi had some nice jumps and some dive bombs. Steve (the owner of the facility) helped me try something new. At the competition I found myself wondering what Jedi would do with a holder on the dock, since he's such a fan of restrained recalls -- but I wasn't interested in trying something new at a trial (and he might have gone over 20'!). Steve thinks he ran faster off the dock, I said it was hard to tell from my vantage point. We traded places so Steve could try to demo how/when I should throw the bumper. I never in a million years thought this would be an issue for Jedi. He went barreling down the dock the first time, tried to slide to a stop right at the end, and more or less fell into the pool. The second time he only got about 5' away from me and stopped. Well, so much for that idea. I was really surprised because I expected he wouldn't care who threw the toy.
I took Jedi along to Secret's chiro appointment yesterday afternoon to get a weight on him. He's up to 29.2 lbs, so he grew again! We're going to an agility trial tomorrow so I hope to get a height on Jedi there. Training wise, yesterday I introduced Jedi to a tandem turn. I was watching some videos on the OneMindDog page yesterday and decided to go ahead and give it a try with Jedi. We started with cones and moved on to an exercise with two sets of wings. The foundation work that Jedi has done made this exercise come pretty naturally to him and we were able to have a lot of fun with it. The only issue we ran into was when he would do the flip and then run all the way around the other wing of the jump instead of wrapping the near wing. He did this in both directions but probably had a little harder time when he was turning right. He figured it out in both directions and with a few different scenarios.
Today was a day of "do all the things." Knowing we are traveling over to Camp Bandy tomorrow, the best choice today probably would have been to stay home and rest (or do silly things like clean). There were too many other things we could do today, though, so we hit the road around 8:00 a.m. Our first stop was run-throughs at Canine Sports Zone. Jedi was so happy to be back there again! He was even more happy when he realized that he got to go play in the arena. I signed Jedi up at 4" -- he was the only one, so he got to play first. Unfortunately I'd only gotten there 15 minutes earlier and barely learned the masters course for Kaiser & Kizzy, so I went into the ring with pretty much no plan for Jedi. He didn't care, he had fun. I got the second time recorded -- at least I had figured out at least somewhat of a plan for that turn. Regardless, the point was just to get Jedi playing in a new place with other dogs around. He did awesome! He got lots and lots of compliments from those watching.
The other big fun thing happening today was dock diving in Hillsboro. Pier Pups, the same people that put on the stuff at the fair, is there all weekend for some firemen's festival that the town is having. Hillsboro is less than an hour from home (albeit in the middle of nowhere), so this was hard to turn down. I ended up swinging over on our way home from Middleton today. It's not exactly on the way home, but it was faster to go straight there than to take the Klee Kai home and then drive down. It's a good thing that none of my dogs get car sick, because those were some interesting roads we were on today. I think we took every back road between Middleton and Hillsboro, and we were never on any one stretch of road for more than 9 miles before we turned onto yet another county road.
My goal was to make the 2:00 splash, but that didn't happen because the run-throughs were really popular today. We left CSZ around 12:45 and ended up getting to the park around 2:20. This ended up working well because I had plenty of time to find stuff, sign up, park, and potty the dogs before the next splash at 3:30. They let me take Jedi up on the dock right after the 2:00 session ended, so we didn't have to wait for the practice time for the 3:30. For Jedi's first trip into a new pool I threw the bumper, walked him back, and let him go. He had absolutely zero hesitation going off the dock, so after that I took him all the way back and ran him like normal. He had some good jumps during warm-up but started to go flat, so I ended with a couple of pops to get him thinking "up."
I'm not a huge fan of how things were run, at least compared to our last experience. At the NADD trial you did both of your jumps back-to-back -- in addition, you could have a warm-up jump so long as you declared it and got it all done within 4 minutes. I think this format helps some dogs to jump better, since for some that first jump is a throw-away. With Pier Pups everyone gets dock time before you start, then once things get going each dog jumps once, gets back in line, then jumps again. The best of your two jumps is your official jump. Jedi pretty much thought this one and done format sucked majorly. I had to trick him into thinking he got another turn to get him back up on the dock, as he's gotten wise to me holding the leash and knowing that this means we're done with our turn.
By the time all of that wrapped up it was actually time for the next wave to start. I debated signing Jedi up for one more but I figured we'd gotten what we came for -- experience in a new pool/place -- plus the bonus tennis ball swim. Jedi had been barking, and barking, and barking during the tennis ball game, so I didn't even know how much gas he had left in the tank. Knowing that we have a long day of more driving ahead of us tomorrow, I opted to head for home. I'm glad we were able to fit in both of our fun options today. Jedi sure had fun!
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