The VA Trifecta: Edgeworth

Mid-October provided a week of trialing in the central VA area with Edgeworth, Quiet Acres, and Lexington SDTs.  I had to run back-and-forth from home to squeeze in a couple days of work, so it was a busy week for me, but so worth it!

The grass at Tommy and Florence Wilson's was pretty darn tall this year, and plenty of seasoned dogs did some odd things as they got disoriented and frequently lost site of their sheep even when hot on their tails.  Rae, who has always gone on a left outrun, showed me that she wanted to go right, and whaddyaknow...I still hadn't learned my lesson.  I made her go left and she proceeded to ignore my redirects and cross-over on her way out.  Yeah, it's a tough outrun over tricky terrain, it's almost 600yds I think, and the grass was taller than she, but still, she's been to the top plenty of times and I was totally surprised that she crossed.  Not listening at all, she even started coming back down the field on her original trajectory as I desperately tried to get her to turn back.  Then she was out of site behind some hills for a ridiculous amount of time, even ignored my recalls...I did think we were going to have to fire up the Mule to go find her.  Thought maybe she'd gone to a neighboring field looking for sheep.  Well, she turned out to be very clever, once she hit the fence she followed it to the top to find her sheep!

We had lost so much time that I tried to just hustle the sheep around the course.  I don't remember much about that trip around, made at least some panels, but only had about 2 minutes as we started the drive, so we just shoved them around and back to the pen where we timed out.

Second go, I gave her the desired right-hand outrun, she needed a get back about 2/3 of the way out as the terrain started to suck her in, and this time she took it perfectly.  A surprise to me since I hardly ever practice outruns with her, she is so natural.  Another suprise, she overflanked at the top, even being sent into the pressure of the set-out, so we had a poor start to the fetch.  Got things settled for a 25 point drive and on to the pen.  The sheep were difficult to pen all weekend and I got myself too excited when the first two went in and prematurely stepped in to put pressure on them...aaaand spooked the third on her way in.  We never did get the pen (or shed).

 "Don't you go wide around that post!"

(M. Dobbs photo)

So a bit of a disappointing weekend, especially since there is a good chance this was Rae's last fall Edgeworth.  Next year she'll be 11.5 and it may be just too big of a course for her.

So Gabe practiced spotting sheep from the sidelines for next year.

Taking it all in

(M. Dobbs)