Today, Laddie, Lightning, and I had the opportunity to train with friend who is also a fine trainer, handler, and judge. He’s organized a small group for weekly training at an excellent property about an hour and half from home and was kind enough to include my dogs and me in the group.

Before we worked with the group, I ran Lightning on a Walking Fetch drill with a variety of bumper shapes and colors. He’s about equal in skill for all three drill variations, and we’ve continued proofing from day to day, but I’m not satisfied enough yet with the quality of his Here and Fetch responses in distracting environments to go onto our next yard work task, casting, though I can hardly wait to get to it.

Temps were in the mid-50s, borderline for water training, and I think some of the dogs might have shown some minor avoidance on their water entries. But it was great getting Laddie and Lightning some water work after weeks of land-only training.

We started with a four-blind drill that included two blinds tight past a gunner in a chair, and one of those was under the arc of a poison bird. Laddie had some difficulty with that one but got the entire drill done. The trainers could modify the work, of course, and I only saw one other trainer attempt the poison bird blind, but his dog ended up picking up the poison bird rather than continuing to the longer blind. I got to run Lightning on the poison bird as a mark. We practiced our line manners coming to the start line, I provided minor support with his tab to prevent a break, and he ran a nice mark, delivering the bird to hand. We don’t often get to work with birds, so I felt that was valuable. But for me, his nice return in a new and distracting location, and among unknown trainers and dogs, was the best part, since field recall was always the greatest challenge when I started training Lumi and Laddie for field.

Next came a Q-level water triple. Laddie ran it without help but cheated the water re-entries, so that’s something in addition to taking casts into wind that I want to focus on with him this spring.

After the big dogs had run the triple, my friend took some birds to one side of a 30-40y wide channel and I took Lightning to the other side, and my friend threw three walking land-water-land (LWL) singles, two well up the embankment and one at water’s edge. Lightning squared his water crossings but aside from that did a nice job, running straight to each bird once ashore, picking the bird up, and bringing it back to me across the water. This was only his fourth day of swimming, his second of LWL retrieves, and his first LWL retrieves with birds, so it was a good milestone.

The other milestone came earlier, while Lightning and I were waiting for my friend to set up on the other side of the water. Possibly because that water is sometimes used for Hunt Tests and Hunt Test training, there were several decoys floating in it. I’m not sure Lightning will ever see decoys in competition because I guess they’re not used in field trials, but it was a good opportunity to have him learn about them, so I threw a white bumper near a few of them for him. It’s always amusing to watch a young dog learning about decoys.

Although the day had all the highlights mentioned above, probably the best highlight for me came when my friend was ready to start throwing and I needed to wrap up the game I was playing with Lightning and the decoys. I had thrown the last bumper so that Lightning would have to swim past two decoys on the way to it and it had drifted pretty far out while Lightning was detouring around the decoys. Lightning lost track of his direction, and I guess it was a bit hard to distinguish the side view of the bumper from the decoys from his angle in the water. Since we haven’t trained casting, I had no trained way of getting him back on the correct line, and besides it was getting to be a pretty long swim. I thought I’d need to bring Laddie out of the van to pick the bumper up.

But first, I tried calling hey-hey-hey and faking a throw to the bumper. Lightning turned in the water and swam straight out to it, swimming past both decoys on the way out and the way back. It was just a simple Junior-level open-water retrieve to all appearances, but it was actually a nice addition to the rest of the day’s work given the subtle challenges involved.