Dogzworth's Big O tournament

Lucy ended her 2008 flyball season with this weekend's tournament, NAFA Region 20's biggest: Dogzworth's Big O! Held at Montreal's Olympic Stadium (known as the Big O), the tournament is part of a huge dog show/companion animal expo, featuring a two-ring flyball tournament, an AAC agility trial (which Lucy participated in last year), obedience competitions, disc dog trial, a conformation dog show, a conformation cat show, and of course tons of vendors and breeders. The flyball tournament this year was pretty darn big with 62 teams coming from as far as Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Connecticut!

Lucy ran with DGB's regular team: Start dog extraordinaire Kia (NAFA's #1 Red and White Setter), yes-even-huge-dogs-can-have-gorgeous-swimmer's-turns Rocky (huge chocolate lab and mellowest rescue dog ever), Lucy running in third, and squirty-9"-height-dog-who-even-with-teency-short-legs-is-way-faster-than-Lucy Niki (fellow Ottawa Humane Society adoptee, corgi/german shepherd mix). All the dogs ran well, though in the spirit of true teamwork they each made a contribution or two to the flag situation. Lucy VERY uncharacterisically dropped a ball in two heats in the second race on Sunday. She never ever ever drops balls. The only time she might leave a ball behind is if it's a bad bobble and it rolls too far out of her lane. But in that one race she dropped the ball after the first jump coming back from the box, in the first two heats. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that this race was in the rightmost lane of the right ring, which was adjacent to the crowd (see photo), so maybe she was distracted? Strange though since she had run in that lane on Saturday and had no problems. Oh well -- aside from those two goof-ups there were no other issues all weekend, and hardly any bobbles. I was happy with her times which were 5.4s and 5.5s when the pass was decent.

Going into the tournament Lucy needed only 100 more points (i.e. four heats under 25 seconds) to get her next flyball title, so she is now Lucy, Flyball Master. Oooo, doesn't that sound impressive? My best-time-5.2 hound mutt is a Master of Flyball! Funny eh.

Oh and a professional photographer took AMAZING photos of all the dogs so there's *finally* a nice shot of Lucy jumping in flyball! Lucy has an awkward jumping style so her flyball jumping photos usually come out looking not so great. But he got a really nice one of her stretched out which will be posted here when I get a copy of it. In the meantime, here are a few more very unprofessional photos:

The setup for the two-ring flyball tournamement.

The cat show cats had some pretty fancy-looking crate setups. Do you think I'd get any strange looks if I dressed up Lucy and Walter's crates like this at our next agility trial or flyball tournament? :-D

We stayed at the Auberge Royal Versailles, an easy eight-minute drive away. Perhaps not quite as fancy as that cat's digs, but I would definitely stay there again - the room was huge, with a reasonable rate of $107 per night including taxes. Lucy and Walter were superstars and have come so far in the hotel manners department. Not a single peep out of either of them the whole time. It would appear that gone are the days of having to keep them leashed the whole night so that when the slightest noise caught their attention I could grab them quickly and shove food in their faces to keep them quiet!