CPE trial Saturday; hurricane coming!

Libby and I are signed up for our first CPE trial on Saturday evening, and our first trial away from where we train. Very exciting! To add to the excitement, unfortunately, Saturday is when Hurricane Irene is supposed to buzzsaw up the NC coast. We're in the middle of the state, so we may get lucky and not get hit too hard here, but who knows. Oh, well.

The trial should be fun. It's called "midnight madness" because it starts at 6:00 pm and goes until it's done, usually after midnight. I only signed up for the first 3 of 5 classes because both Libby and I need our beauty sleep! (And the last 2 classes require distance work, which we aren't doing yet.)

Libby should do fine if I don't get too stressed out (a big if!). And if there's no thunder...

Has anyone trialed in the rain? Do you have any advice for wet conditions?

My best advice is: Don't stress if your dog doesn't. My dog doesn't react a touch differently when it is raining, even though I sit there and stress about it. She'd actually much rather trial in the rain than in the heat. Don't write it off as being an issue until you see.

If you have a dog without spectacular self-preservation skills, I'd keep an eye on the ground and other dogs to see if anyone is slipping (also, be careful yourself!).

Good luck! I don't do much CPE, but I've enjoyed every one of their trials I've been to. Fun games, usually a very nice group of people.

Good luck!!

Libby did great; I made the expected rookie mistakes. We Q'd in Wildcard (yay!), and would have Q'd in Colors if I hadn't bumped an upright and brought a pole down... In snooker, I didn't realize that non-red obstacles could be taken more than once, so I laid out a stupid-slow course, didn't adjust when I saw what other people were doing (I was afraid of getting confused), and so didn't have enough points when the whistle blew. But Libby did go clean, so we'll do better next time!

One thing I definitely have to work on. Turns out that Libby is a bit sensitive - once in each class she thought she'd done something wrong (my miscues, of course), and she shut down - I couldn't coax her into position to take the obstacle. (One run, there was a sharp right turn after a jump; I forgot to slow down as I approached the jump, so she thought we were going straight afterwards. Instead, I turned right and called her. Of course she thought she'd messed up! Another run, she ran past a narrow jump - I think my line was too angled. That's the jump I ended up bumping.) Luckily, I figured out that she'd follow me if I ran away from the obstacle, then I could turn around and get her going again.

As for the hurricane, the trial was just at the western edge of the storms, so it didn't get much rain and the rain ended by the time the trial began.

Anyway, I had a wonderful time! Libby basically had fun, too, although she was ready to go home about an hour into the 6 hours we were there...