Reese @ the Working Certificate Test - Saskatoon Retriever Club

Del Brave Flying Colours, RA, WC, CRAMCL
On June 17, 2011 Reese passed the Working Certificate Test at the Saskatoon Retriever Club. Reese ran in the lucky 13th spot in a field of 18 Retrievers.

The land marks were back to back singles using ducks. The marks were fairly straight forward at more then a 90 degree angle apart. The first mark was to the right of the line and was the shorter of the two. I would be hard pressed to say what the lengths were. But they seemed to be on the shorter side of the requirements. As you can see in the picture the grass was fairly long and this did cause a few problems for some of the dogs.

The water marks had to be adjusted after the test dog ran as they were 40 and 70 yds and had the dogs swimming into a very strong wind for the long bird. The marks were changed so that the shortest and the first bird thrown was thrown from the right so that it would stick on a point rather then drift out and was about 40 yards. The long mark was changed to be thrown out into the open water and would drift towards the dog.
Neither mark seemed too difficult and the throwers gave every dog a good throw. The only factor that made the long mark difficult was that the dogs were swimming into a very strong wind. The wind caused white caps on the water and when the dogs swam low to fight the wind they seemd to loose sight of the bird. You could see many of the dogs push themselves high up from the water and stretch their necks to see the bird. When they did this it made swimming into the wind difficult.
When the ribbons were handed out 11 of the 18 came away with a pass.