Decoy Days Pay off in Reese's Hunt Test Debut

On July 24th and 25th, 2010, Reese ran in her first CKC Hunt Tests. The tests were hosted bythe Brandon Retriever Club in Brandon Manitoba. We travelled with our training partner Lianne who is running her Golden, TeeJay in Senior and Aimee, a pup of her breeding in Junior.
The Brandon grounds are fantastic and the Brandon people very friendly and supportive.

The morning of the test it was warm and wet as a thunder storm moved through the night before and left a few puddles . The judges set up some very nice marks that were fairly simple compared to some Reese had seen in training. She came through land and water with only a few delivery glitches and qualified in her 1st Junior Hunt Test.

On Sunday our land marks were thrown around a snow goose spread. The Junior dogs had some fairly wide marks that had them run the perimeter of the spread. All though it seemed daunting to the handlers who had not seen them before, the marks were well outside of the spread and did not cause many problems with the dogs ability to find them. Water marks were a different story, both were very similar in that they both landed on land, but had the dog enter the water, go over a finger of land, re-enter the water and then find the bird on land. The water entry from the line had a row of duck decoys about 5 feet in front of the line, all facing the dog and handler.
Reese cracking the decoy's defensive line.

The decoys caused problems for half the dogs as they tried to skirt the decoys and enter further down the bank, this of course put them off the marks or caused them to shore run.
Two dogs completely shore ran to the mark. One other shore ran on the way back. Of the remaining 3, two of the dogs Reese and Trip entered right at the line and were not phased by the decoys. Both these dogs had the benifit of training at Decoy Days set up by two of the or club members Red Wilkinson and Wayne Nessett. So a big thank you to both of them for setting up decoy day and providing such a great training opportunity, Reese came away with her 2nd pass in this Junior Hunt Test.