First trial of the year

This weekend was the official opening of my trialing season. An arena trial running in conjunction with the Calgary Stampede Aggie days. Aggie days is short for mob of small children, strollers, pregnant women followed by blankly staring men. Finally in Isla's four years of trialing she is starting to get this arena trial thing. For those of you that don't know arena trials are a timed event where you have to get the sheep through a set course. You have four minutes and the fastest time wins. Our first run went not to bad. Could have been much faster if Isla had not decided to put on a clinic on super square flanks. Which I am now calling obstuce flanks. Not sure where we ended up but it was in the top five out of 30 dogs. Day two went much better managed to shave over a minute off our time and end up in the top five again. Which meant making it to the finals. We had a tough draw in the finals the lead ewe was a Suffolk who just wanted to run and the other sheep wanted to stay made it hard to maneuver but in the end we ended up fourth. Isla is getting better and better at these arena trials. Looking forward to the Calgary Stampede this year. Speaking of the Stampede trial heads up to all that enter because this year they have decided to cut the entries down to 60 dogs instead of 80. So get you entries in early.

Thanks to Wendy Schmaltz for the picture.