Glorious weather

We were at our last outdoor flyball tournament of the season yesterday at Great Barford in Bedfordshire.

The day has some surprises for us. Firstly the lovely picturesque location on the banks of the Great Ouse river.



And secondly the glorious sunny weather which at the moment is in the 80f and is breaking records in England as the hottest on record for this time of year.




So the choice of having this flyball tournament which was run by the High Flyers Club on the cooler banks of this river was quite inspired.




The racing format was also different for this tournament and followed the one used in European Championships.

Normally we race in a league system but this was something called a double elimination. Basically its a serious of races in the morning to get a fastest time so your team can be seeded and then its a knockout competition in the afternoon in which you can lose only once to race in a play off. Its not as complicated as its sounds!

And even better I got to race again. Do you like the nifty colour of my leg protector bandages?



Auntie Breeze and Dare raced in Division 5 and only lost one race all day and eventually won their Division.

Obviously my teams racing was much more exciting. I was racing in Division three in the same team with Chip, Lightning Shock. We had another of our Clubs teams Lightning Bolt in our Division. So we had planned some very competitive encounters with them.

As you can see both me and Chip had been practicing our runs back to our tuggies.





Chip being a real show off is also developing his 'hanging on' to the tuggie technique and I think is probably practicing to enter the next Olympics in the Gymnastic event.



But back to the racing.

The other Clubs team got the fastest time in the morning in our Division and we got the second fastest time. So it was going to be very close. Both teams won all their races until we met for the first time when we were narrowly beaten by them. But we won our knockout race against another team to then go into the finals and to race against once again our rival Club mates.

Very exciting.



In the 'first' final race we took it to two legs each (the winner being the first to win three races) to beat our team mates in the fifth race. But as the competition was a double elimination, after a short break for another divisions final, we then had to race them yet again as they had beaten us in our earlier encounter.

Once again it came down to the final race with both teams again winning two legs each. With the light fading Chip being last dog in our team went into the very last run of the competition neck and neck with the other teams last dog to beat him back and for us to win the Division!

What a great way to finish the outdoor flyball season!