Blinds

AM: Oaks Area 2

LAND SERIES: Triple blind with remote casting starts (Laddie, then Lumi)

I pre-positioned ODs at three locations while the dogs were in the van. I then brought out one dog at a time to run the series.

The first blind was the right blind at 100 yards. It was in front of a tree in a widely spaced line of trees that ran at a diagonal angle to the line to the blind.

The second blind was the left blind at 150 yards. It was also in front of a tree in a line of trees, widely spaced but not as widely as the trees on the right.

The third blind was the center blind at 180 yards. It was in front of a woods.

The field at all three Oaks areas is thick clumps of grass over uneven footing, mowed several months ago, somewhat grown out and now dormant for the winter.

We've run on this field many times, and though the dogs have never run these exact blinds, experience suggests that if I had cast them from heel as normal, they might have lined one or more of the blinds and had little trouble with the others, resulting in little practice handling. To get more benefit from the series, I decided to use a suggestion from Alice called remote casting starts on all three blinds with both dogs.

To accomplish the suggestion, I started each blind by placing the dog in a sit 30 yards from the SL on a line slightly off the line to the center blind. I walked to the SL and used our come-in cue, whistling tweet-tweet-tweet and placing both hands near my knees. As soon as the dog took a few steps, I blew WS, the dog sat, and I called "good job". Then I cast the dog to the blind. For the first and second blinds, I used angle back casts, while for the center blind I used a straight back cast.

I later realized that 30 yards might have been too far away for typical remote casting starts. Re-reading Alice's email where she described this procedure, she suggested 10 yards. In the future, I'll switch to the shorter distance.

The remote casting starts were effective in giving us more practice handling, because the dogs were unable to get on a perfect line to the blind from those casts. In each case, they took an approximately correct line, so I let them run for some distance rather than micro-managing their early lines. When they got closer to the blind, I then used additional handling as necessary to guide them the rest of the way.

Neither dog slipped any whistles, and based on their body language, both seemed to find this an enjoyable game.

Today I experimented with silent casts. Laddie has always responded well to them, and today I found that Lumi also responded well to them. In the past Lumi has sometimes ignored my arm movements unless I also used a verbal cue, but that didn't happen at all today.