Agility, agility... I mean.. cruising, cruising :)

More than once this year I have thought about agility. The training has been wonderful and ever more addictive. Our plans for cruising have formed and I have only about a month left of "normal life" with my dogs. This has made me almost panic about losing my weekly lessons and practices. Not to mention all the people who have made my agility training such a fantastic experience. Don't get me wrong though, I'm SO excited about our plans to see the world, and what makes it even better, our black n' whites are coming with us. It's going to be a family cruise, a dog family cruise :).

I hope to achieve in agility what I made my goal so long ago. To enter my first competition in the United States before heading into new adventures. Speaking of which, my firts entry is going to be at the Sir Francis Drake Kennel Club trial in Vallejo this coming weekend. So exciting!! I really hope everything goes well. Vanilla and I have been doing some pretty good runs at practice but as everyone knows, trial situation can be totally different. I am feeling really good about the issues we previously had with weavepoles and contacts. She has been improving with her contacts tremendously and hardly ever misses the stop. It sure was a good thing we started from scratch and really taught the whole thing all over again. Also weavepole entries have been improving and she is now more independent. We still have tons of work to do on that part though. I'm slowly trying to get more ahead or be more behind and get lateral distance and front and rear crosses.It is a slow road but I can already see how practice is paying off. I'm so proud of little Vanilla. She is as fast as ever, as focused as ever and probably loves agility more than ever :).

This said I'm probably going to have more to say on agility front these following couple of days since I'll be practicing every day before trialing both next Saturday and Sunday. After this I'm going to go for a few more practice sessions before we leave. Then the following months I'm going to concentrate on different kinds of dog things, namely, how to cruise with dogs. I have a plan of water rescue training sessions for both Vanilla and Gin and a set of tricks I will teach while on the boat/sailing when other activities are more limited. We are also going to concentrate on exploring and hiking/camping and maybe visiting local dog training clubs for a random class here and there along the way. I'm sure the dogs are going to be the opposite of bored. Of course they also need to perform they active duties as guard dogs. Vanilla being noisy, and Gin looking scary is a pretty good combo :) Except in this photo: