Great news from the Hidden Acres South kennels the past couple of weeks. We have put a dog on the derby list! Doc, our Golden Retriever received a 2nd place and a 3rd place last weekend and made the national derby list. It requires 10 points to make the derby list and Doc now has 13 points. We are having a great winter trip with the derby dogs. Doc is on the list, and the 3 others are all within 2 points of making it! Ice has 9 points and has one more week before she ages out of derbies so hopefully she can pick up that last point this weekend and make our second dog on the list. Clyde has 8 points and ages out in late August. Finally, Larry, has 8 points and ages out in May. This would be a HUGE accomplishment for us to go 4 for 4 with these derby dogs all making the list. Making the derby list with one dog is extremely difficult, and being this close with 4 is an extremely big accomplishment. We are just starting another young dog running derbies too. Eli, he is just barely over a year old so he has a long time to compete yet (can not be over 2 years old to run derbies).

I took a week of some much needed R&R this week and flew back to Minnesota to see my family and friends. This was much needed and will definitely give me a second wind to finish off our winter trip strong, both mentally, and physically.

We are on our third week in a row of trials. This week I am taking Kirby down to Miccosukee Florida to run the North Florida Qualifying on Friday. Marc is taking the derby dogs to Pavo Georgia to run the Tallokas deby on Friday, then on Saturday he is taking the derby dogs down to Miccosukee for the North Florida derby.

I have been getting into Kirby quite a bit this week as training standards needed to be raised and he is responding OK to it. Hopefully with the excitement and adrenaline of the trial he will be loosed up just enough to be on his game.

With the nice weather we have been having we are taking advantage of it and hitting the water pretty hard. We are running both water set ups and land set ups each day. Here are a few examples of what we did.

The first picture is a blind. The objective of this blind was for the dog to take a long angle entry into the water. There are three points of land in this blind that the dog/handler team needs to navigate. The first point is on the left just after the entry. The dog must swim past this point and through a channel of water. The next point is about halfway through the blind on the right side and the dog must swim past this point also. Finally, the third point is about three fourths of the way into the blind and the dog must get on the point, then get back in the water to finish the blind successfully. The qualifying level dogs were ran on this blind cold. The derby dogs had a white bucket marking the end of the blind.

 This was a water marking test we set up on Monday. The marks were thrown left (75 yards) right (150 yards) middle (300 yards). The dogs had to clip a sliver of water on the left hand bird. Then the right hand bird was thrown. Dogs had to fight factors of not squaring the bank to the left and ending up behind the gun, and not giving into the factor of swimming and cheat out early on the right side. Finally the middle bird was through the middle of the pond, drive up passed the right hand gun and go get the bird. Sounds easy, but was quite difficult because we retired this gun and he was not visible to the dogs when they exited the water. Was a very good test and would have been a real killer if it was ran as a true triple.