So still trying to finish Bryce’s C-ATCH before summer (or at least getting as close to that goal as possible) we set out bright and early last Saturday morning on a 2.3 hour trek to Connecticut for one day of the SNEAK trial.

Day started a little rough … about 5 miles from home my car began doing bad things. Weird, bad things. Weird, scary bad things, like responding erratically to the gas pedal. NOT a good feeling! I almost turned around and went home, but like the “Q ho” I’ve become, decided that I’d give it until the Tappan Zee bridge (i.e. still in an area I know) to either 1) fix itself or 2) break down completely before making up my mind.

Happily, it chose #1, and the rest of the ride was uneventful, if very long!

Got there a little later than anticipated – which would have been fine if we had a NUMBERED course to start with, but what was our first class but Jackpot – and a “non traditional” one at that! For you non-CPE’ers, a “traditional” jackpot is like USDAA gamblers – you accumulate points, at a certain time a whistle sounds and you have a few seconds to do a distance challenge. Some thinking involved (so you accumulate enough points) but not too bad.

In a non-traditional jackpot, anything goes – it’s up to the judge. You really need to catch the briefing and think a lot harder and plan more than with a traditional jackpot. This one had 3 distance challenges on course that you could do at any time, 2 of them overlapping, all with different point values, and there were some fairly complicated rules about what you could/couldn’t do if you attempted one and failed it.

Unfortunately, I misssed the briefing and nearly all of the walk-thru and couldn’t get it into my early-morning-and-scary-drive-frazzled brain which obstacles in the 2 overlapping challenges belonged to which, so for breakfast I had 2 NQ’s, over easy – damn!

Things improved from there – both dogs Q’d in standard, Jayda Q’d in Colors (finishing her level 5 requirements in that class), both dogs had really nice, qualifying runs in Jumpers at the end of the day. I probably could have salvaged Bryce’s Wildcard run, but it was hotter out than he’s used to and he was slow and not looking too happy so instead of fixing a probably-fixable mistake I took him off the course. Good move, he had much more energy and it had cooled down a little by Jumpers and he was much happier on that run.

Here’s the jumpers course – I thought it was fun, but I always like jumpers. Tunnels 9 and 11 were a lot closer than they look on the map (jump #6 was straight in front of dogs coming out of #11)! Lots of teams got “eaten” by the dummy jump at the end – that part was really quite easy as long as you didn’t handle with the jumps on your left (which put that jump right in the dog’s path).

And here’s the Colors course. Colors is two short nested courses, you choose which one you run (we did the square one). It’s really too easy, especially for the upper level dogs. I think it would be a LOT more interesting if there were a handling restriction at the first decision point, like a tape line you can’t cross until the dog takes one of (in this case) the #2 obstacles…

I should probably shut up before I give anyone ideas!

Raven came out a few times to sit ringside and socialize, both of which she enjoys. She’s not at all bothered by any of the sights or sounds at trials – *I* enjoy that! She’s very sweet and very good when watching, the one thing I have to be careful about is that she wants to play with EVERYBODY so I have to be vigilant to keep her out of trouble when walking through crowds of people and dogs (who may view her as more of a snack than a playmate).

There was a vendor there with some very cute colorful collars and leashes – I was tempted to invest in a spring wardrobe for my little foofoo but I resisted (only because they didn’t have martingales).

We left right after we ran Jumpers – it was around 6 PM and IF by chance my car was going to have problems and IF I were to end up stranded and waiting for AAA in the Middle of Nowhere with 3 dogs in the car (one of them being Jayda), I figured it would be somewhat better if it was still light out! Fortunately none of that came to pass, and the car WILL be visiting the car doctor before next weekend!

There was a photographer at the trial, but it seems he was only shooting the “baby dogs” (levels 1, 2 and 3) ring on Saturday – boo hoo !!! Oh well – here’s a picture of Jayda jumping from another trial – this picture makes me laugh! I have no idea HOW she keeps bars up with those dangly back legs, but she always does!