The weather was nice and cool this weekend and the 2 brown dawgs took full advantage of it.  They had training first thing Saturday morning.  They worked on was a variation of a pattern blind using the “T” field.  The purpose of this drill is to work on left and right overs.  This diagram shows this drill.  First their handler sent them straight “back” to retrieve a bumper (1).  Next the dog was sent half way back, stopped with a whistle sit, then a bumper was thrown to the right in full view of the dog (white star).  Then the dog is handled to the pile of bumpers to the left with a “Left Over” (2).  After the dog picks up a bumper from the #2 pile, then the dog picks up the mark to the right (3).

Marks are fun and raise the dog’s excitement level so they want that hand thrown bumper, but the training is to get them to take the casts in the opposite direction.  Once they have success, then you reverse it and throw a bumper left and handle them right.

Thunder did very well on this and his handling on land seems pretty solid.

This will be a good drill to work on Storm’s handling.  She took the handles eventually, but needs more training to make them solid.

Then we moved to the water and worked on channel blinds.  A channel blind is where the blind is placed at the end of a narrow channel of water.  Given a choice, some dogs will choose not to enter the water in a straight line.  They will tend to run around on the bank before entering the water.  Once in the water they will tend to want to ping-pong off the edges of the pond rather than swim straight to something they cannot see (blind retrieve).  The following diagram illustrates this.  The black line is the desired path.  The purple lines are the path the dog might want to take if given a choice.  We used back and orange (rather than white bumpers) for this.  The black and orange bumpers are not visible to the dogs from the opposite end of the pond.

The path in purple is the path Thunder basically took his first time up.  He was never a bank-runner with marks so he never had to have corrections for this.  But with blind retrieves, he doesn’t always choose to go straight to the water.  He was recalled whenever he did not go straight to the water and resent.  It wasn’t long before he understood that he needed to go straight into the water.  Once in the water, if he tried to get out of the water early, he was stopped (whistle sit) and cast back into the water with an “over” and then stopped and sent “back”.  By the end of the session, he seemed to understand.

Storm was very solid on this.  She went straight into the water and swam until she hit those bumpers.  When she was with the trainer, part of what they worked on was her going straight into the water and swimming until told to stop.  It sure seems to have paid off.

We repeated this on two more sides of the pond as shown in this diagram.

A few pictures of their work…

We won’t work on channel blinds exactly (our trainer advised us not to over work these), but we will work on making sure Thunder is solid on going straight to the water and staying in the water until he is allowed out of the water (at the point where the blind has been placed).

After they finished training, the 2 brown dawgs tagged along to a barbecue at Storm’s breeder’s house.  There were lots of Chessies there, but the 2 brown dawgs were happy just to snooze in their crates in a shady spot.  Unfortunately I didn’t think to take out my camera to take any pictures of all the Chessies.  🙁

On Sunday there was still more training for the 2 brown dawgs with their trainer/handler’s HRC Club.  They set up a double on water.  Again no pictures, sorry (had to stay home and clean the house which needed it badly :)).  Thunder did well on his double.  By the time it was Storm’s turn, they had changed out the person throwing the bumpers and I guess she got a super-duper long mark.  Plus, the wind was blowing by then.  She got most of the way out to the bumper, but was drawn to a dead tree (?) standing in the water.  Her trainer/handler elected to handler her to the mark.  It took two handles and she got it.  Good girl!  It sounds like it was a very productive training session for both dawgs.

Needless to say, the weekend left the 2 brown dawgs and their people…pooped!