This time of year the dogs are in serious training mode, or I should say that Freighter is.  We have him entered in a test in a couple of weeks so we have been concentrating on his training to hopefully get him closer to Thunder and Storm’s level.

On Saturday he ran a series of three blinds which were quite challenging for both dog and handler.

The starting line for these blinds was at the top of the hill.  For two of the blinds, the dog had to run down the hill, cross a field and then go through a ditch to get to the blind.  The third blind was about 170 yards out.  It was a long blind.  If you think about a football field being 100 yards, it was almost 1 3/4 of a football field.  It required the dogs to go down the hill, cross the field, cross a road and cut a corner of a pond to get to the blind.

Controlling the dog through all of these changes and at that distance is not as easy as it sounds and is exactly the kind of training that Freighter needs.

Freighter has been running these more challenging blinds for a few weeks now and hubby is finding that his initial line is not as good as it was a few weeks back.  This is probably because with the increase in difficulty of the work, Freighter is over thinking things a bit.  The solution is to continue running these types of blinds, but also to do some lining drills to remind Freighter that he should follow the line his handler gives him no matter what he sees in the field.  This is something to take away from a training and and work on at home during the week.

Back to these blinds.

The first blind required hubby to turn Freighter so he was running diagonally down the hill.  This is something we have not trained much since we do not have a lot of hills like this.  It took a bit for Freighter to take this line.

Hubby was able to get a nice sit out of Freighter even though he is close to the blind.  Requiring this sit is working on control at a distance.

The middle blind (Blind #2) was easy for Freighter.  Sometimes a dog will get pulled back over to the first blind, but Freighter did not fall for this and he had more confidence running it compared to the first blind.

The second blind done, next up the third blind.

He is a bit off line probably because he thinks he is going back to Blind #2, so hubby stops him to redirect him.

The key to running this blind successfully was not only keeping the dog on line, but also getting the dog into the water to cut the corner of the pond.  The picture above shows the blind in relation to where Freighter is stopped.

Freighter needed to be stopped a couple of times as he crossed the field.  Hubby is working on really slowing down his casts and making Freighter sit and wait.  It is not as easy as it sounds.

It took a couple of casts to get Freighter into the water, but he got in.  Dogs that are just learning this will try to run around the corner on land.  Freighter tried, but hubby was able to stop him.

Freighter was a bit off line as he got out of the pond and did not see the blind so he overran it.  Hubby needed to sit him and direct him back to it.

The trick coming back was to make sure the dog got back into the water and did not cheat around the corner on the return.

It was a challenging series of blinds but hubby and Freighter got through it.  Nice work!

It was also a challenge for me to take pictures.  It was a bright and sunny day and these blinds are well past the distance where my camera lens can take decent photos which is why the images are not as crisp as I would like.