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A successful weekend, after a long frustrating year and half.


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The challenge of moving to a new country is you have to start all over again to get back up the grades. I compete in two different venues in Spain, RSCE (FCI) and a smaller one that works on regional leagues. Even when we were really where a novice team we struggled in starters/novice due to the very fast nature and limited turns of the courses and had much more success when we moved up.

I started competing in FCI 18 months ago, and have to travel absurd distances to compete, well it's actually not the distance but the 7 1/2 ferry ride so it gets really frustrating when it goes wrong, at grade 1 you need three points to move up between grade 1 and 2 (grade 2 to 3 is harder) but they are very strict on refusals which has been a big cause of our lost points, we got our first in our very first trial in December 2015, and did not get another until this March, this weekend we escaped with 2 first places, 2 points and the win of the class. It was so much fun to run the grade 2 classes the next day, reminded me my dog and I really do know what we are doing

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Congratulations! I understand your frustration, and the relief in finally breaking through! I had my first pass in novice last year, then had to wait 12 months to get my next pass. In the end when the drought broke, we got the remaining four passes we needed in two trials, so onward and upward now.

 

Also, you were able to run the next day in the higher grade? That is fantastic. We have to send off proof of our passes and pay a smallish fee to get our title, but we cannot compete in the higher grade (or continue in the lower grade) until that title is granted.

 

Out of curiosity, in ANKC agility trials in South Australia/Victoria they have a grade called Open, which any dog can run in. I have come darn close to getting passes in it even before I got my novice title with Oscar. It is somewhere between excellent and master grades in difficulty, but has an exclusion zone, where you must direct your dog from a distance. Do either of the venues you compete in have anything similar?

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Well done. You don't have to go back to square one if you compete in the UK. Are you coming to the KCI this year?

We are now Pam, we are going to do the border collie classic and then KCI. I have actually had my hotel booked for months for KCI just keeping my fingers crossed it would all come together. He needed to be FCI grade 2 for the BCC and I did not want to bother coming to KCI as grade 3, also if we did not qualify for BCC, my plan was to wait till next year and compete at KCI with both dogs. It was getting really frustrating as I could not believe how difficult it was proving to get out of grade 1 with my experienced dog, but when judges think a giant M, is a decent course and no dogs get a clean run then it's not just us, but it does make you start to double your skills. The reason we had to start over is because we competed in USDAA and NADAC, if we had competed in AKC we could have transferred over, the same applies to KC, our titles did not transfer.

 

Out of curiosity, in ANKC agility trials in South Australia/Victoria they have a grade called Open, which any dog can run in. I have come darn close to getting passes in it even before I got my novice title with Oscar. It is somewhere between excellent and master grades in difficulty, but has an exclusion zone, where you must direct your dog from a distance. Do either of the venues you compete in have anything similar?

In Spain there are no games and I miss them, in the US both USDAA and NADAC the two venues I competed it had a titling class with a distance handling element, slightly different in each organization but the same concept.

 

 

Also, you were able to run the next day in the higher grade? That is fantastic. We have to send off proof of our passes and pay a smallish fee to get our title, but we cannot compete in the higher grade (or continue in the lower grade) until that title is granted.

 

 

You can run in the higher grade and be eligible to win but any points earned do not count, you are also free to stay in the lower grade if you feel your dog is not ready to move up and needs more experience and it costs nothing to move up. When we were in the US you could move up the next day in both USDAA and NADAC the two organizations we compteted in. I wasn't going to spend a moment longer in our private hell of grade 1, I walked the grade 1 course with a friend and it was once again not nice, yet the same judge had a really nice grade 2 course with just the right amount of technical handling for the level to make it interesting and a little challenging.

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