Thread: Trial Reports.

The Ulster Irish Red Setter Club – Open – Pointer & Setter- Sunday 15th September 2013

The Ulster Irish Red Setter Club held an Open Stake for Pointers & Setters on Murley Mountain at Fivemiletown as the guests of the Hamilton- Stubber family on Sunday 15th September 2013. The trial was run under Kennel Club Field Trial rules and regulations and the judges for the day were Steve Robinson and Carol Calvert.
The outstanding feature of the day was the weather. We were in the throws of our first autumn storm and I took a wind speed reading of 37 mph in the afternoon and on the way down the M1 some hours earlier I saw a grey squirrel blown bodily across the road. The morning saw frequent and heavy showers but these dwindled over the day and although the wind gusts didn’t fall much below 20 mph we were in bright sunshine by the late afternoon. There was a vote of the competitors so see if the trial should go ahead and obviously the majority decision was to proceed.
Result :-
1st F.T.Ch. Ballyellan Cara Bill Connolly’s English Setter bitch handled by Gerald Devine.

Alex.
Things conspired against Alex. He is so responsive to other peoples’ whistles that it can curtail his performance. Our opponent today isn’t a noisy handler but it was enough in the circumstances to make him look poor. The more I think about it England in July with plenty of grouse is Alex’s forte.
Basso.
What to say? Trialling is 85% ground work and 15% bird work. Basso was good for 95% of the time but in trials anything less than 100% doesn’t usually cut the mustard.
His first round was top drawer. We had a slight cheek wind from the right with the ground running at a fairly steep angle from left to right but also slightly from forward to behind if you catch my drift. This meant to do the wind correctly Basso would be slightly forward and up the hill on the left and back and down hill on the right, and that’s exactly what he did. The right side was terminated by a deep gully maybe two hundred yards away and the skyline might have been a hundred and fifty on the left. He did his ground extremely nicely and at good pace. He took direction when needed and that was only the once. I reckoned that any grouse on the left, exposed to the full force of the wind, would be the village idiot. I liked the right side away down in the relative shelter by the gully and towards the end I turned him in the middle once and sent him back down to a likely looking spot.
The second round was in heavier ground but we started off doing the ground right. There were birds about and I wanted to get as many cuts in before we were over the top. Again only the village idiot would have been on the windy side of the hill. Ha! Double Ha!
Basso was going fairly well for a second round in heavy ground but then all of a sudden he was running twice as fast. We had hit The Duck Pond Lane and ultimately it was our undoing. The lane ran across our beat. Basso isn’t lazy and he isn’t stupid either so he took a spin up the lane on the right. By the time he was back level with me on the lane he was behind me so I called him off the lane to run in front of me. With hind sight maybe I should have let him go on out along the lane to the left but I was worried that he would just come back along the lane and judges don’t like dogs behind handlers. So he ran past me maybe twenty yards into the wind before going left at right angles to the wind. Our fate was sealed as we were now over the brow of the hill and The Village Idiot was lurking in the heather, now down wind of Basso. It looked really strange to me when Basso turned back to try and locate him and ran maybe ten yards down wind, you guessed it, over the top of the idiot grouse.
So there’s the stats and all. Lets keep it simple. He probably made fifty casts over the day in total, like they were drawn with parallel rulers and his last cast is flawed. As I said 98% doesn’t cut the mustard, but that said he did me proud.

I didn’t vote for the trial to go ahead and I feel there is little doubt that had we got a better day for a rerun there would have been a better result but that said the event is now over and judges etc. don’t have to turn out again later in the year.
With the exception of Alex all the other dogs ran, some harder and some more effectively than others, but they all gave it a go. Bird work was always going to be difficult but it was no surprise that the winner’s find was in the lee of a small bank of peat. Any bird in the open ground had ample opportunity to get off side.