DOCNA Nationals - October 2008

After blogging about USDAA Nationals, I did have to mention that Luce and I went to DOCNA Nationals the first weekend of October. It was up at Barto where we usually train, so it was a no-brainer :-)

DOCNA, Dogs on Course in North America, is a fairly new organization that is a lot of fun. They sort of took all the best parts of the various venues and discarded other parts. Courses are nice and reasonable, equipment is whatever is available (ie what we are used to) and training in the ring is well defined. 3 tries up to SCT and then out. I took advantage of that in August when Luce flew off the aframe. I let the judge know we were dropping to training and I put her back on the bottom of the frame. The look on Luce's face was priceless because this doesn't happen at a trial!! We then swung around, did a few jumps back to the aframe and she stuck it. Came back over, stuck it again, good girl and out! The next run was North America Challenge (sort of like Grand Prix) and Luce got her contacts, good girl :-)

Blaze will be debuting in DOCNA in December as I can go back and train. Plus it is still a low key venue which will help.

Anyway, I didn't do the whole 3 days as Keystone was the following weekend with Kinetic the weekend after that. Too much pre-trial prep work to do! So we went on Saturday only. Got a Nationals shirt and a tote bag of goodies. The judge and one of the venue owners are Canadians so they even played Oh Canada as well as the National Anthem :-) It was also a beautiful day in terms of weather and we knew a lot of people there. A lot of Kruisin Kanines folk as well as Keystone and others that I knew.

Luce did really well ... got her weave poles again. Only had one dropped bar and that was in the National Challenge which meant we came in second instead of first. Still, that earned her a silver medal for the East. The course was built out west as well (they apparently spent hours on the phone getting both courses as close as possible) and the results were combined. We would have finished 3rd in the country except for that uncharacteristic dropped bar!!

This pic is courtesy of Michelle Yon. She got one of Luce with her ribbons and medal and also got some of MABCR dogs as well as Kruisin dogs. The rest of the pictures are at Michelle's site.

DOCNA doesn't just have a warm up jump, but also has warm up weave poles. They also had one of the new self healing tires out in the warm up area, and later on, the dogwalk. I ran Blaze over them and he was great!!! Not sure if I was "allowed" to run Blaze on that stuff, but no one else was waiting to use the area and someone else said to just go ahead.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I went. Now I can say that we went and competed at a Nationals event! We are already qualified to go next year, but apparently the weekend is being changed as they couldn't nail down the site in the West. 2009 will be the same weekend as the Keystone trial, so 2009 DOCNA Nationals is out for us ... and a lot of others as well. That made me doubley glad that I went!