The Workers Party began around 7:00 p.m. last night at the Agricultural Hall in McDonald’s Corners. There was a wonderful turkey dinner for everyone, paid for by Iams. Ken thanked everyone individually who had helped make this trial run so smoothly and then Trevor thanked Ken for his outstanding job as Co-Chairman. Attendance was excellent, which shows how much people appreciated the wonderful food, throws, site preparation, catalogue, and all-round organization. The attention to detail has been amazing. The Social Committee has done a fabulous job of feeding all the workers and judges their lunches and dinner every night. They are Carolyn Crosby, Jacqueline Kennedy, Sharon Dickens, Tara Graham and young Erica Allen.
There was a bit of haze under cloud cover this morning, with a gentle southwest wind. The sun, masked by clouds, was shining just to the right of the handlers. Ken’s test dog, Hobbes”, ran today’s water triple at 7:30 a.m. It was a small,l rectangular “hockey pond”. There was fencing around the perimeter of the area, some of which was wooden, and some of which was page wire. The page wire ran across the back of the site about 80 yards behind the fall of the centre bird. Hobbes disappeared through the wooden part of the fence on the middle gun, then couldn’t find his way back to the bird through the page wire. Ken had to go down and help him find a way through. The Judges then adjusted the centre and right hand guns by moving both of them more to the right and by reversing the throw the centre gun had made. At the same time, they also had the workers erect a logs-and-brush screening behind which the right hand bird would be thrown.
Test 5 - Water Triple
The second test dog, changed now to Diana Beatty, ran “FTCH AFTCH Gillian of Erinhills” at 8:00 a.m. The left-hand gunners sat down immediately after throwing and were thus, in a sense, retired, but it was the “Go-Bird”, so their retiring did not have the same impact as a traditional retired gun would have had. The throws were Centre, Right, Left.
Our first dog, #39, Sharon Gierman, with “Colt Forty-Five II”, ran at 8:15 a.m. while the second test dog honoured for her, on leash, slightly behind and to her right.
The first throw, from the centre gun, was a very long throw of a hen Mallard from Right-to-Left. It was thrown from a clump of trees to a spot in knee-high grass behind a 20-foot-deep wall of cattails on the shoreline at the back of the pond. Those gunners then retired. The dogs had to run downhill, enter the pond at an angle, swim diagonally across the pond, punch the reeds, and hunt up the bird. This mark invited cheating! Because of the increasingly gusting wind, some dogs that did cheat that mark by missing the water completely, may have been rewarded by winding the bird.
The Right Hand gun threw a drake Mallard from Right-to-Left, angled back towards two trees and behind the screening the workers had just built. There were a good number of small hunts on this bird, and most dogs cheated the corner of the pond to some extent. As the “dragback” increased and the wind grew stronger, dogs began to have bigger hunts on this bird. By 9:00 a.m., the wind was strong enough to blow over an empty garden chair and at one time blew over the canopy protecting handlers in the holding blind.
The “Go-Bird” did not cause many problems, only an occasional small hunt. However, the page wire fence behind the long gun did cause some problems, in that some 6 or 7 dogs hit the wire because they couldn’t see it and they were trying to run deep of the bird. Some then continued to try to punch through it but were unable to do so and one even tried to jump it. However, the fencing did prevent the dogs from driving deep on all of these marks and so, in a sense, did keep some of them in the test.
The test was completed with a “By-Dog” at around 12:30 p.m. There were three handles and a “pick-up”. Three dogs were dropped. They were numbers 20, 31 and 33. There remain 32 dogs.
Sixth Series - Land Triple
The Sixth Series land triple began at 2:20 p.m. today, with Ken Crosby’s dog, “Hobbes” as our first test dog. It was teeming rain for the first test dog, which did have some difficulty with this test, but it had stopped raining by the time the second test dog ran, “FTCH, AFTCH Bluenorth’s Nubile Tessie”, owned and handled by Irene Malton. Tess did a nice job and Irene wasn’t bad either. Made one spectacular cast there, that’s for sure!
The first of the remaining 32 dogs was # 3, “FTCH, AFTCH Prairiemarsh’s Duckman”, owned and handled by Norm Elder.
The test was an indented triple, with the handler facing northeast in the general direction of where the previous day’s land blind had been planted. However, even though it was a good distance behind the marks, because the two outside marks were retired, and because dogs love to run to the top of a hill, some dogs did re-visit yesterday’s blind area, which generally resulted in a handle or a big hunt.
Again, the test was set up within a bowl of rolling hills, with the handlers standing on a little rise, but pretty much in the valley. The test took about 7 minutes per dog.
The dogs had to run down a 10-yard slope of knee-high cover, across a large expanse of short cropped grass, then up a long, sweeping slope of short grass, dotted sparsely with Juniper bushes and small trees. The throws were slightly out of sequence as the order was right retired, left retired, short middle.
The gunners on the right hand side threw a drake Mallard from Left-to-Right, angled bac, behind some Juniper bushes, then they retired behind a tree. The long gun on the left side threw a hen Mallard in a flat throw, then retired behind a holding blind. The short, indented gunners threw a cock pheasant from Right-to-Left; it was a very long throw – a widely spaced hip pocket to the left hand gun.
The dogs had plenty of room to run around out there, without a lot of objects to help them identify the fall of the birds. The sun came out early in the series and a strong west wind blew from behind the handler so, unless the dogs went deep of the birds, they were unlikely to wind it without the help of some wind swirls, which I’m sure existed out there.
The short gun didn’t cause too many problems, except that some dogs hunted between the gunner and the bird and a few stopped at the fall again on their way to the right hand bird. An occasional dog had to be handled out of that short fall.
The Right Hand bird caused some handles and some fairly big hunts on either side of the retired gunners. A few dogs put their noses right on the long left-hand retired gun in quite a spectacular fashion. Both these marks were much more difficult because the dogs had lost sight of both on their way out. Some dogs went completely out of the field on this mark.
The last dog to run was #1 and the test finished at 6:25 p.m. with multiple handles and four “Pick-Ups”. The ten dogs dropped on this test were Numbers 4, 10, 14, 23, 24, 38, 39, 40, 41 and 43. There are now 22 dogs left.
Tomorrow’s test will be a tough land quad (my inside information, you know) and dog Number 9 will be the first dog.
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