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Monday, May 14, 2007

Beacon Grade1-5 jumping course


We may have cracked it! Hope you can view this course. It wasn't as easy as just saving it as a jpeg or bmp because the CRCD wouldn't let me do that. Maybe because it is the older program? Anyhoo....we had to actually copy it and open it up in another program (we used Paint) and then paste and save as a jpeg. I have to thank my wonderful marvellous genius of a husband for figuring it out. Yes....he made me say that!
I do not think I quite have the exact spacing correct and I have to work that out as sometimes I design a course and then it just doesn't fit as I expect. It may be my lack of "spatial awareness" as Lisa likes to tease me about. The same reason I sometimes run into agility obstacles and knock them over or trip over my own feet! HA!
The course did run well and I liked it better than some of the straight up and down courses I sometimes see at the lower levels. The dogs that won had more independent weave pole entries which shaved time off of their runs because they didn't need to push the dogs forward and waste time. There were almost no dogs eliminated by going into the tunnel after 5/9 or by going in the wrong tunnel entrance. The majority of eliminations were from lack of start line stays and dogs blasting over #5 instead of turning right to #3. And the majority of 5 faults were due to knocked bars and incorrect weave entries. I should have written down the numbers of clears, faults and eliminations as well as winning times but the weather was so bad I didn't have the ambition. I just wanted to get back on the road for the 3 hour drive home!
No more judging for me this year as I want to concentrate on Hex and Zen and getting ready for the try-outs. I have printed out some of the USA world team tryout courses and am going to set some of them up. I would think that they put sequences in that they felt were representative of what they will see in Norway.

2 comments:

Chi (Obay Truly Focused) said...

Kewl you got the course on the blog.
May i book a blogger lesson with Denis plse :)

Anonymous said...

The course looks good to me. I would like to have had a go at it. It's interesting but pitched at the right level for 1-5 IMO. There's always something on offer for the dog to do but no nagging. However, the quicker the dog the more other obstacles come on offer which then tests the skills of the handler more. Exactly as it should be! Nancy