Friday, June 12, 2009

Friday Drill Work

I went back to the Ann Arbor airport today for drill work. I ran the middle and left pattern blinds with Ty, which went quite nicely. Then we tried the right one. She was convinced that she needed to go to the middle one again. I eventually got her to the right one, but it was really ugly. I sent her back to the left one, then tried the right one again. Ugly again. Somewhere during one of those ugly blinds, I used a small e-collar correction, which seemed to get her going again.

I put her away and set up my two launchers, aiming for in-line marks, with the launchers to either side of the line to the right blind. Since I still don't estimate the length of launch (ridiculously long for a bumper) very well, the farther away one ended up under the arc of the closer one. I decided to start with poison bird blinds with Gryffin. I launched the closer mark, called him off that and sent him to the left blind. He needed just one whistle to get the blind correctly (it helps a lot that he's run these blinds several times in the past week - a LOT). He picked up the mark eagerly. Then I launched the farther away launcher, called him off and ran him to the middle blind (behind the closer launcher). He did veer to the right after passing the launcher, but handled reasonably quickly to the blind, then picked up the mark. He finished up running the right blind.

I got Ty back out and ran the two marks and then reran all 3 blinds. I moved up quite a bit for the right one, given her problems earlier, and it went much better. I had Gryff run the marks as a double and do the right blind.

I moved to another area and set up the Split-Y drill that I did with Gryff on Thursday. This was Ty's first try. I used our white trash cans to mark the piles, and started to teach her about angle back casts. I had to stop her several times the first try at each direction, and call her back in a few times because she was getting too close to the middle pile, but subsequent tries were better. She's running some nice, straight lines. I had Gryff do just a bit of this drill (to finish picking up the bumpers) and called it a day.

Sure was nice to have sunshine today instead of a steady downpour!

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