Monday, August 17, 2009

Water Blinds

Depot Street (Greenville, Maine)

I asked the host of the cabins where we're staying for a suggestion on where we might do some water training, and his suggestion for that was as good as his suggestion of the local airport for land retrieves yesterday: a scenic lake about five miles from our cabin, used for a community event in May but apparently rarely visited this time of year.

On another gorgeous day, in as lovely a setting as we've ever trained in, here was today's session:

SERIES A. Double water blind (Laddie, then Lumi)

The first blind (OD) was to the right at 60 yards. We ran from water's edge and the blind was at water's edge, so the entire blind was swimming. The second blind (OD) was 135° to the left at 80 yards. We again ran from water's edge, but this time the blind was set several yards back from the water.

For the first blind, the dog swam parallel with the shoreline most of the way, creating suction to the dog's right. For the second blind, the dog swam nearly parallel to the shoreline on the left at first, creating suction in that direction in the early going, then converged on the far shoreline on the right, creating suction in that direction at the end of the outgoing swim.

I ran both dogs in tight corridors, and Lumi and Laddie showed nice responsiveness the entire session.

Here's a satellite view of Series A. Our SL was on the east shoreline. The first blind crossed the points of the "C" toward the north, and the second blind crossed to near the point of the teardrop toward the south:


View Double water blind 20090817 in a larger map

3 comments:

davebezesky said...

It looks like a good blind would have been from the blind location on the left, across the tips of both points, and over to the far shore. Or past one point and over the other, to the far shore.

Pretty cool!

Lindsay, with Lumi & Laddie said...

Thanks for looking at it for me, Dave. Today was my first day at the location, but I expect to train L&L there several more times over next two weeks, so I appreciate the suggestions.

As I recall, the south point has some kind of structure on it that doesn't show in the satellite view, which is why I planted our blind at water's edge today. I may be remembering wrong, but I don't think a dog can go over that point.

The other consideration is that L&L will be competing in Senior this fall. I don't think we'd see blinds like the ones your describing at that level. Often I do overtrain for our level, but if it's going to take too many whistles, I'd rather have the dogs work closer to event level and build confidence.

One idea I had was to send them past the island from various angles. They should be pretty comfortable with that, and I think they'd still be overtraining with respect to Senior level.

davebezesky said...

You're probably right about training too far above senior level. You could run two blinds. One over the point they can run over, then past the one they can't.

Looks like a nice spot.

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