This past weekend Freighter finished his AKC Master Hunter title in Ohio at the Buckeye Retriever Club’s Spring Hunt Test.  He is now: CH SRR’s Northern Gales Of November MH WDQ.

I am so proud of hubby as an amateur owner/trainer/handler and Freighter for achieving the dual AKC titles of CH and MH.  This combination of titles among retrievers is not common.  In fact I believe Freighter is one of the only, if not the only, Chesapeake Bay Retriever in Michigan to hold both the Champion and Master Hunter titles.   It took a lot of hard work to earn both of these titles but it paid off this past weekend.

If you have followed the blog, you know that Freighter’s main issue was that he had a hard time maintaining his composure on the line at a hunt test.  Hubby had to work long and hard on his steadiness.  Freighter’s actual work was fairly clean, but he would take himself out of the test because he would break (or leave to retrieve before being released by the judges).  In a Master test, that is an automatic DQ.  Freighter has matured a lot over the last year and kept himself together enough to pass 4 tests in a row to finish his title (5 total passes were required for his title).

We do not have his ribbon yet because the test was taking a while to finish and we had a long drive home with storms expected on the way, so we left after Freighter ran the last series.  He had clean marks all three series (meaning he required no handles), and completed all the blinds so we felt confident that he would earn a passing score, but you never know until the judges add things up at the end.  We drove home and waited for the results to be posted online.  It sort of reminded me of college when I would wait for exam results to be posted.  The results were posted yesterday and we had confirmation that Freighter had in fact passed and earned his title.  (Of course it s not “official” until we receive the certificate from the AKC.)

Before we left the test, we explained to the Hunt Test Secretary that we needed to leave and asked her to please mail the ribbon (if there was a ribbon) and she said that she would be happy to do that.  We gave her our address and some money to cover postage.  Hopefully I will have photos of Freighter with his title ribbon soon.

As for the test itself, I will have more details on that in my next post.  But in the mean time…thanks to everyone who helped with Freighter’s training and to the members of the Buckeye Retriever Club who worked hard to put on a nice test and of course a big thank you to the judges!