Our ponds are still pretty chilly because our weather has been more winter-like than spring-like.  Chilly water is a good time to work on angle entry water blinds.  Requiring a dog to take an angled path into a pond is one of the more difficult things we teach a dog to do.  It takes a lot of practice.

For this training three piles of bumpers were set out.  One was on land and two were set at the edge of the pond.  The dogs were directed to each pile by their handler giving them arm signals for direction.  The dogs did not know where these piles were ahead of time.  They had to rely on their handler.

Blind 1 was on land and was easy because it was marked with a black stake which made it visible to the dogs.

As soon as the dog returned with a bumper from Blind 1, they tuned to the left to run Blind 2.  Blind 2 required to make an angle entry into the pond and essentially cut the corner of the pond.  This can be very difficult for inexperienced dogs because they may want to just run around the corner on the land; however, we require Master level dogs to get into the water and take a path close to the one marked on the diagram.

Freighter took an acceptable path to the water.  Once he was in the water, he had a bit of trouble maintaining his path.  He kept trying to go to a little cut-out in the side of the pond.  We have run blinds with bumpers in that cut-out on previous training days.  Hubby just continued to direct him away from that cut-out and toward the actual blind.

Freighter did a nice job returning in the water with the bumper.  Last year at this time, he tried to run around the bank with it so you can see that his training has progressed.

Blind 3 was the most difficult.  It required the dogs to enter the pond at an angle but they also had to run past Blind 1.  With Blind 1 being in close proximity to the path to get to Blind 3, it tended to draw the dogs over to it.

Whenever Freighter tried to move toward Blind 1 hubby stopped him to put him back on track.

Freighter ended up getting into the water a bit sooner than hubby intended so he had a long cold swim to the blind.

Freighter did fairly well on these angle entry water blinds, but he could still use some practice on them so we will definitely do more of them in coming training sessions.