Oregon State Fair

My flyball team was invited to do a fun match at the Oregon State Fair. The team did a number of demos throughout the day, followed by a 28-race-long fun match in the afternoon/evening. I ended up working in the morning so wasn't able to participate in the demos, but did make it up in time for the fun match.

For the most part, I helped out by box loading for the various singles, pairs, and teams that were running, but I did get a chance to take a few pictures of the dogs in the later part of the evening.

This is Dash, one of our newer dogs. He ran in his first tournament in July.

Dash has a great turn.

And he sure is pretty.

Neena is still pretty new to flyball in terms of years, but old in terms of being solid. She has a great turn that was trained without the use of props, using shaping and a clicker. As you can see, that method really worked well for her.

Nice tight turn

On her way back

Brit is an old hand at flyball, though she hasn't been in it nearly as long as my dogs. She is ball crazy, but very eager and willing. And while she doesn't have the slim and sleek build of the fast border collies, she sure can turn on the speed.

Coming off of the box

On her way back

Taking photos of sports outside is so much easier than indoors. You can keep the ISO so much lower, punch the shutter speed so much higher, and the autofocus tracks so much easier as well. I really like how well a lot of these photos turned out.

Pallo and Koira didn't participate in the fun match. Koira has such a dock diving obsession that I knew if she heard or saw the dock diving happening right next to the flyball area, she would be a terror in her crate. I didn't want to have to manage her the entire time I was there, so she had to stay at home. Pallo came along, but didn't run. He did wear the donation vest over at the dock diving competition for a little while and work the crowd. He picked up $15 in donations for Chase Away K9 Cancer in the few minutes we were over there, and had a great time getting petted and scrounging dropped fair food as well. 

Overall, the fun match went great and the day was a lot of fun.