Category: Swimming

Swimming

Happy Birthday Cuillen

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Beanie and Biggles’ monthly swim with buddies Tess, Clara, Tara, Jamie and Cuillen was due today. And as luck would have it the date coincided with Cuillen’s 2nd Birthday, so what better excuse for a Party!!! This time we were joined by Val (our obedience teacher) and her dogs Lucy, Anna and 16 year old Star. Jamie and Cuillen brought along their house guest Mouse.

A great time was had by all! We had a lovely birthday cake, party bags and Cuillen and Jamie even got into the spirit of the party by wearing bathing caps and snorkels! All the dogs in our little group enjoy swimming but it’s also a great chance for them to hang out with a bunch of other nice dogs and brush up on their socialisation skills.

I don’t think Val planned on having old lady Sky in the water, but at the last minute she decided it might be good for her. It was lovely to see. She was apparantly quite a swimmer in her day, and it really seemed to give her a little boost. She swam really well and she was looking very perky after her swim.

There isn’t much footage of Tess, Clara, Tara, Beanie and Biggles as they were in the pool first and the camera was fogged up with all the steam.

It’s the Biggly Boy’s birthday next month – we’ll need to think up something special for his party!

Agility Practice and a Cooling Swim in the River

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I’ll start out this post with some lovely photos of Beanie tackling the agility long jump in our back garden today – I think I’ll be getting one of these printed and hung on the wall!

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Sunday’s fun agility session at the racing put both Beanie and I back in the mood for a practice session. It was too short notice to hire the agility barn, but as today’s course plan shows, you can actually fit quite a good course into our tiny, postage stamp garden!

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It was a tricky course in places are there were two points where there were different possible routes. I had to make it clear to Beanie with my body language what way I wanted her to go (something I’ve not had much success with so far), and she had to pay attention.

  • After the first time over the long jump she had to go through the tunnel (4), but the second time she was to go over the jump (10)
  • After the first time through the tunnel she was to go through the weaves (5), but the second time over the jump (11)

Anyway, enough rambling. Here’s the video of Beanie in action and as you will see we didn’t do too badly :

We’re still not doing much jumping with Biggles. We’ll hold off on that until he’s a year old. However, we do give him the occasional little go, and we do quite a bit of work on commands and directional controls. Until recently it was hard work – he got so excited he simply couldn’t pay attention. But he’s doing really well now – in many ways he’s easier to work with than Beanie as he doesn’t have her strong independent streak. When he does start agility properly he’ll make fast progress!

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It wasn’t just in agility that we made progress. After a very energetic walk in the park we decided to go down to the river to cool down. Louise (Tess, Clara and Tara’s owner) had suggested that we try throwing Beanie and Biggles favorite dried fish snacks into the river to encourage them in for a swim (although Beanie is an excellent swimmer she likes the pool heated to at least 29 degrees and tends to avoid rivers). As you can see it was a big success (Thanks for the tip Louise – now we can wash the mud off BEFORE we go home !):

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This might look like a kiss at first glance, but in actual fact Biggles has found a leaf and Beanie wants it!

We came across this in the middle of the park:

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There didn’t seem to be anyone around so I’ve no idea what it was all about. But I thought it was quite funny.