The Columbia Cup Agility Weekend

This past weekend, September 12th and 13th, the shelties and I went to Ridgefield Washington to play agility with the Columbia Agility Team (CAT) at the Clack County Fairgrounds. The Columbia Cup is a special award given to the team that has the best accumulative score in the four regular classes in Novice, Open, and Elite and is divided between small and large dogs. Kant won the Novice Small Dog Columbia Cup in 2004. Kant did not want the pressure of winning the Columbia Cup again and knocked a bar in Regular Round 1 and then went on to run clean in the other three Regulars. And Echo did not want to follow in her big sisters paw prints and win this year.

Kant had an amazing weekend qualifying in 9 of the 12 classes. She ran great!! We Q’d in 3 of the 4 Regulars, Touch’N’Go, Weavers,

Tunnelers, Hoopers (our first time in Elite Hoopers),

and the greatest of all is the 2 Elite Jumpers Qs!!! It took us 3 years to finish Open Superior Jumpers which we did in May and since then we have earned 5 Elite Jumpers Qs. Only 8 more to go to get our NATCH!!

My big blue Sheltie ROCKS!!!

Echo on the other hand crashed and burned this weekend. She had 8 runs and qualified in 2 of those. But those two were absolutely amazing runs;

one was in Jumpers and the other was in Hoopers. She had pieces of greatness in a few of the other runs and moments of why are we here. I completely lost the start line stay

by the end of the weekend. I know better and will not let it happen at the next trial. Echo had a judge gasping leap off the A-Frame

and I had flash backs of Kant at Argus November 2004. I have a list of things we will be working on over the next few weeks… We will get past this phase and become a team. And there is no doubt when you are watching Echo run that she puts 200% of her heart in to each run

and tries hard but sometimes youth has to come out.

Thank you CAT for putting on a wonderful trial with wonderful judges!! It is always fun spending time with my dogs and agility friends!! Thank you Joe Camp for all the wonderful agility pictures!!