Competition day – Melford Hall estate shoot

The day of the competition has arrived, over the last few weeks competitiveness has been increasing within the group of people attending the competition, egging each other on and comparing training via videos, all in good humour you understand.

For the competition each stage was dealt with in the same way regardless of age or breed of dog, below is the areas we were marked on:

Walk to heel on lead
Sit and stay at 20 yards
Single marked retrieve
2 retrieves with heel work – 2nd dummy to be a memory on land
Hunt up 2 dogs, drop to shot and single marked retrieve

Having only been back in training with Autumn for 2 weeks after her spay, I knew there were some areas which we might struggle with, However before the start of the day, I took some time with Autumn away from the other participants to cover some sit and stay so it would steady her up and small retrieves to practice delivery to hand, Autumn likes to showboat her retrieve occasionally and she had done this on our first session back so I wanted to make sure she got it out of her system first.

There were 10 dogs taking part in the competition, ranging from all ages and experience, every dog ran through the same exercise each before moving onto the next, each exercise is based upon the training we do during the summer in preparation for the season and also the Gundog grades.

As I thought there were some areas where Autumn was not as strong, she sat for just under the time limit and did some ‘showing off’ when doing her retrieves, but I changed my position back to my knees to encourage Autumn in, this seemed to help and settle her down a little.

Over the summer we have been working on the stop whistle with Autumn when a shot is heard, this has been getting better, she stops slightly hovering in anticipation, we are working to get the bottom down fully and also not running in on the dummy, during the hunt up she did quite well quartering and turning on the whistle, when the shot was taken she stopped well, I reinforced the sit position and when it was her turn to take the retrieve she did this well.

Overall she did really well and I was pleased with her, doing the competition has shown areas of what I need to work on going into Grade 3 on Sunday, but I feel confident that with some focus on these areas then we should do well moving into the season.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out Autumn had come joint 3rd with 2 other dogs and we needed to take part in a tie-breaker, this was a dummy launcher marked retrieve, Autumn did not mark the dummy as well as she normally does as it went into the longer grass, but she went out to the area directly, hunted around without running off scent and picked the dummy within a few seconds and delivered straight back to hand.

Unfortunately she lost out by 1 point to Inca, a Labrador, who did her best retrieve of the day too, what was really nice was the way Autumn held up against the 2 other dogs in a situation she has less experience with, she did not give up and worked the area lovely.

Now we are using the competition results to concentrate on areas moving forwards into Grade 3 on Sunday.