On Monday Mandy and I took Harvey to the Yorkshire game Fair at Harewood House, Leeds. I decided it was time to run Harvey in his first Scurry, and I'm very pleased and very proud to report that he performed each of the 3 retrieves better than I could have ever hoped. We scored a total of 23.5 points out of a possible 30, and I left feeling over the moon with his performance.
There was quite a queue of people and dogs lined up in front of us on the first retrieve, and I was worried that it would all be too much for Harvey. As those of you who know Harvey will agree, he's quite the sensitive soul and as we waited in the line, I decided to do a bit of T-touch with him to settle him down a bit. This seemed to work well; he relaxed and was very much on the ball when sitting for his first retrieve. I began to think he might perform well.
For anyone who wasn't there, the first retrieve was a basic marked retrieve into knee height clumps of grass in what I presume is quite a marshy area after rainfall. The dummy was thrown by someone who was sitting 50yds or so away, Harvey marked the fall area very well and on command shot out and did a very nice clean retrieve. Score for this retrieve was 8/10.
The second retrieve was from water. Again, a dummy thrower threw the dummy into the lake and after the judge gave the go ahead, Harvey did another nice retrieve. He can be a bit tentative when entering water, and thankfully the lake bank was gently sloping so no need to jump into the water. For this retrieve he scored 7.5/10.
The third retrieve was the one which I was most worried about. We’ve not done a huge amount of retrieves over fences, especially ones this height. It was a timber post and rail fence that had a line of double height straw bales lined up on each side to assist the dogs getting over. Again a dummy was thrown by an assistant over the fence and into the wooded area on the other side of the fence. Harvey again marked the fall area very well, despite not seeing the dummies exact landing spot at the other side of the fence due to the straw bales, and on command, did a very clean retrieve. For this retrieve we scored 8/10, totalling 23.5/30.
The judge on the first retrieve was very impressed by his performance. He queried if Harvey was a show Cocker and was very positive in his appraisal. The second judge was also very good but deducted a point or so because Harvey had a bit of an excited whine on the start line. The third judge was absolutely fantastic. He was I guess in his late 80’s and said he had been training/working dogs for 70 years. I heard that as a Judge he had never awarded 10 points in his life, and as there is always room for improvement, I agree with his opinion fully.
The scurry was still being run when we left, and I found out in the admin tent after we’d finished that there were 5 equal competitors in first place, each with 29.5 points, so we weren’t really that far off getting to that level ourselves!
After discussing his performance elsewhere, I now know of a few areas which I can improve upon and hopefully improve his score the next time we do a scurry. The main points to look at are: Automatically sitting on the start line without me asking him to do it, no recall whistle when he’s already coming back to me with the dummy and tightening up on his dummy presentation.
All-in-all, a great first scurry and I’m very proud of Harv!
