Nadine and I met at Auburn Cinema on Thursday, February 21st. It was about 42º, slight breeze and aged an hour. This track was designed to work on the skill of tracking next to a building, as well as tracking away and turning close to it. Instead I found Gimme was hardly able to do basic tracking. She was a marking-crazy girl and spent so much time distracted by the need to do so. We got through the track, finally, but it took a lot of helping. Oddly her best moment was on the article in the fifth leg. There was a bunch of trash strewn about there and Nadine placed a small trash-like article right in the middle of it. Gimme nailed it and did a great job for the remainder of the track.
I figured she was about to come in season and indeed, she is getting poofy-butt as we speak. One challenge of the cinema grounds is all the dog marking. Many people traveling in motor homes and they stop there overnight and walk their pets all over. Mostly Gimme has learned to ignore this distraction. However, right before she comes in season she seems prone to leaving her own calling card. Oddly when she's actually in season, this tendency lessens quite a bit and she does some of her best work.
On Saturday, February 23rd I laid a track for Gimme around the Shopco and Best Furniture buildings. I picked this spot because I didn't think there would be a lot of dog marking to contend with. I also picked it because it's right next to Regal Cinema, so I had a movie to go to while it aged. It was 40º, no breeze and aged 2:10. That's the longest-aged track Gimme has worked on pavement. She did a lovely job. There was still a little more marking than usual, but much less than we'd had two days earlier. My goal for the time being is to focus on line handling, and especially, corner communication. Sil said I need to have very well marked tracks, so I can be sure exactly where the corners are. Then when we have solid corner communication (my query and her response), I'll be able to work better when I don't know where the corners are. I was able to use corner communication in several spots and Gimme responded well. Sil cautioned me to be sure I don't use it more often on wrong line-outs, because it can become tainted as a clue she's wrong and loses its value when I don't know if she's right or wrong. I think I used it 50/50 between right and wrong.
On Friday, March 1st, Nadine and I met at Game Farm Park. I asked her to lay the exact same track we did there two weeks ago - when Gimme overran a corner and then, sliced through a leg (missing a corner and an article) on her way to an article she could smell on the next leg. I asked that she mark all the corners. Of course, duplicating a track does not duplicate the conditions. It can, but it's equally likely the conditions will be very different.Gimme did a really nice job on this track. I used corner communication on 4 of the 5 corners. On the last corner she was hauling me down the track so fast I couldn't get my words out. I used corner communication twice when she was lined out wrong. First on the first corner, where Gimme lined out along the tree-line, about a 45º turn. She responded by curling right and picking up the line of the leg. Good girl.
The other time I used it for a wrong direction was at our little stone-henge (bottom center of picture, 2nd turn). She really had a hard time here. The breeze was blowing from the direction in front of us. Since stone-henge is the highest point in the park and the ground falls away on all sides, with trees in the direction the breeze was flowing from, I don't think the challenge was from the breeze. Rather 98% of this track was on vegetation. The 2% on non-veg included 3 cement path crossings and this one spot, where there was a turn. After considerable searching, Gimme went down the hill on the far side from the turn (toward bottom edge of picture) and this is when I queried "is this the good track"? I think if I had paused just a moment longer she would have come back by herself.
She had searched inside and outside the circle of stones. Unfortunately, she hadn't gotten to the vegetation on the side of the turn yet and the dry dirt wasn't giving her enough information. I was about ready to organize her search in the direction of the turn (didn't want to hint too soon). However, when she came back to the circle after the corner communication she happened to swing out of the circle and down the hill in the right direction. I think she smelled the article on the third leg, but she got going too fast and overran the article, so I had to encourage her to come back and find it.
Clearly we will be doing several variations on stone-henge. Still I was extremely pleased with her efforts. She's such a smarty.
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