We are coming to the end of our winter trip. Packing has started and preparation to leave has begun. We are leaving next week to head to Missouri to run the Kansas City Retriever Club field trial then train there for a week. After training in Missouri we are headed to Illinois to run the River King field trial before we finally head back to home base in Minnesota. Even though we are prepping to leave we are still hitting the training hard.

Here are some blinds we have run the past couple of weeks.

This first blind the objective was a long angle entry, drive over the first point and up over the second point as well. Then the goal was for the dog to swim down the shore parallel before it got out of the water for the end of the blind.

This blind I ran at the Snowbird Retriever Club field trial. A short angle entry, then dog has to clip the left hand point then the blind is at the end of the point on the right hand side. Very tough blind.

This next aerial picture is of a blind drill we ran called a "Tune Up Drill". The goal of this drill is to keep the dogs honest and balanced on their water attitudes. The dogs clip land on each of these blinds to teach them it is OK to get out of the water and get back in. This drill helps the dogs water attitude because they are run for multiple days and the dog can just run by the third day and hopefully do the blind very well without having to think too much about getting in trouble. Very low pressure drill.

The next picture is of the marks we ran today. The left hand mark was the go bird and it was a live shot flyer. The right bird was the memory bird angled back from one piece of land, over the water on to the next piece of land. Very tough bird for dogs to get.  The flyer was thrown left to right, and the memory bird was thrown right to left.

I missed out on a few weeks of blogging but we have been extremely busy in preparation for a strong finish to our winter trip here in Georgia. Team Hidden Acres has place THREE dogs on the national derby list and we currently sit in 3rd place nationally for derby points by a professional kennel!! This is HUGE for us since we are only running 4 dogs. The top two kennels have 14 and 9 dogs respectively. We are competing against the toughest competition week in and week out. I think we are all ready to head back to Minnesota and get that success flowing back home! It will be great advertising cleaning up those ribbons in MN!

I have been running Kirby in the qualifying stakes and he is doing fantastic. Me on the other hand... Not so much. The last 4 trials we have run I have screwed up on the water blind and we haven't made it back to the 4th series. A lack of experience is all it is and we will work through it. Much more a team game than people think. We both have to be firing on all cylinders to make it happen.

I have been accumulating a lot of training pictures of our set ups that last couple of weeks and will share a few with you.

These are some marks we ran last week. Been doing a lot of cheaty water work. Dogs are really showing how hard we are working in training come trial day. The dogs never lie.