Paws On Fire "Rescue Me" U-Fli tournament

Our first tournament since September! It was the first annual Paws on Fire "Rescue Me" U-Fli tournament. The fantastic thing is that all proceeds from the tournament go to rescue! Kudos to POF for a fantastic idea. A local tv news station filmed a piece about the tournament, viewable here.

It was also the debut of our home team, the first time Sammy and Lucy have had the opportunity to run on the same team at the same time. It was a pickup team with two guest dogs and the lineup was Sammy (who did a great job at her first time in starts), Lucy, Niki (an awesome little german shepherd/corgi mix height dog rescued from homelessness in Iqaluit), and Blink (a very charismatic rescue mix working hard to overcome her issues) in anchor. Milo made his tournament debut as warmup dog and looked like a total pro doing his recalls and full runs. Short-but-fast little Niki set the jump height at the minimum 6". Special thanks to Jasmine's human who did a terrific job as first-time boxloader, and to two other teammates who took detailed stats for every race.

Lucy ran clean the whole tournament except for her one and only bobble which resulted in her missing a jump. Well, she did get flagged for some hot passes, but that was my fault, not hers. :-) Her times were in the 5.2-5.3 range when the pass was relatively tight, and she set a new personal best time: 5.222 (previously 5.241... funny how we flyball folk can get excited about such miniscule time improvements!) including the pass into Sammy.

On Saturday, releasing her from 30-32 feet mostly resulted in good tight passes. On Sunday, releasing her from 35-37 feet was necessary to avoid hot passes.

Reviewing video from today's races reminds me that Lucy's flyball striding is terribly inefficient. The peak of her arc is midway between jumps rather than over the top of the jumps, so she's practically landing on top of each jump, coming down within inches of each one. If we can get her striding over them properly she could shave a bit off her time.

The photographer captured several nice shots of Lucy, viewable here (pages 7 and 8).

The weather was beautiful: sunny and warm with an unseasonal high of 22 degrees.