6 Months Old!

Porter turned 6 months old right before Christmas. I'm amazed how much he has grown and how fast the time as flown. It seemed like ages when I was waiting for him to be born and then old enough to come home. My husband remarked the other day how Porter is exactly what we were expecting and hoping for, based on the things we heard about the breed.

I also realized that he is now old enough to compete in Rally (or traditional obedience) but he's no where ready! This gave me a wake up call. I should have been working him more on rally. Not that I expected us to enter a ring this early, but he should be closer to being ready than he is. My main focus is on agility, but dogs cannot compete until 18 months, so I shouldn't put rally on hold in the meantime. Plus I can easily throw in a few rally moves here and there in the house whenever I want and it won't get in the way of his agility training time.

I started working with more of a purpose on his rally moves and was pleasantly surprised at how well he did. He's still in the very early stages and I am rewarding him quite a bit, but he readily completely the moves and stays focused on me. I think all my heeling work as paid off.

So my goal this year for Porter is to get him ready to trial in rally. We will also be working on Nose Work and working towards getting him on birch so we can do his ORT. He needs to be a year old at least, IRRC, so we have some time.

I love the shadow of his tail here with all the feathering

Another goal that has recently come up is to get Porter in the show ring. His overshot is almost gone and I am hoping that by the end of February his teeth will be perfect and he can compete in the Silver Bay Kennel Club show here in San Diego. I don't feel comfortable handling him myself. Who really wants both parts of the team green? Yikes! Right now the plan that we are working on is for his breeder to handle him on Saturday and another local breeder/handler to show him on Sunday. We'll be practicing with his breeder next week since I really haven't worked with him on her stacking or gaiting.

Since the weather has really warmed up in San Diego this week we hit the beach a few times. During our first trip Porter finally swam! He didn't mean to but ended up a little farther than expected while retrieving a stick. He turned around and realized he could touch so he swam back to shore. After that he was smart/stubborn and refused to go past a certain spot and would just level the stick out in the water. Some retriever! :) In this picture he is turning back and was about 2 feet shy of the stick. You can see the tiny ripple the stick is making just past him but he wasn't having any of it. He still happily ran in the water the rest of the trip...just not too deep.

 
On a fun note, Ian surprised me with  a Gopro Hero HD camera which is used to take videos of sports from the first person perspective. You can mount the camera on a helmet, your chest, your surfboard, etc. I *love* gadgets. I love dogs even more and when the two collide I'm in hog heaven. Yesterday I mounted the camera to Porter's collar and we headed to Fiesta Island Dog Beach. Here are two quick clips of his day.


This first video just shows him fetching a stick we found.






This clip show off his recall. It's still in the works, but I was very happy that he left the large group of new dogs and came to be from so far away.






Be prepared for many more videos! My vision is to video tape him doing agility :) I need to monkey with the mount a little since parts of the video (like when he was running full force) are too bouncy and hard to watch. I'd like the camera to be more steady so we'll see what I can come up with.