We had a heat wave over the holiday weekend so on Monday we ventured out early to train.  Thunder got a pass because he was out in the heat all day Sunday running for his first Finished pass.  The little lake we train in is often crowded with people fishing, but we were happy to see there were few people there that morning so we set up on the water first.

We are somewhat limited with what we can set up on this water because of the way the lake is configured.  All bumpers have to be thrown into the water due to the large shrubs which ring the edge of the lake.  On this water, we can’t really train an in-and-out where we throw a bumper on land and have the dog swim and exit the water to get the bumper.  Luckily there is another pond where we can train in-and-outs as long as no one else is using that pond for fishing or to run remote-controlled boats.  When you have to use parks, you just have to adjust sometimes.

We wanted to run some marks and a blind with Storm, so we set up a double.  We used our winger with a long extension rope to throw Mark 1 and I hand threw Mark 2 over the shrubs into the water from the side of the pond.  After Storm ran the Marks, we ran her on a blind which I dropped on the bank where I was standing.

Storm did a good job on the marks.  Even though they landed in open water, there are a lot of weeds the area where Mark 2 landed which can sometimes confuse the dogs and pull them off that mark, but Storm did fine.

Next we ran Storm on the Blind, which was sort of under the arc of the Mark 2, (well as good as we could set it on this pond).  I took some video of her running this blind.  Toward the beginning of the video, you can see something white on the far bank.  Storm was fixed on it, (not sure what it was, probably some trash someone left there).  It was not the bumper, but she thought it was.  She was convinced.  Her handler had to change her mind and get her to swim in a slightly different direction to where the bumper was.  It took a couple of casts, but Storm finally gave up on the white “something”.  It was a good session.  Sometimes when you are out training, you get help from things you hadn’t even planned on. 

If the video doesn’t play try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u47KtVfkxdU

After we finished up water, we also ran a land double with a blind.  It was starting to get hot, so we called it a day.  It is nice to have Storm home.