Ok ... So I guess it was a bit windy at the Quad this year. It literally crushed one of my tents. I had set up the one I got at Dick's Sporting goods. It's a 10 x 10 pop-up type with legs that are at an angle ... not the straight up and down ones like the Firstup ones you get at walmart. I thought the angled legs might give me a better base to work with in these windy conditions. I anchored that thing down with nice spikes but it was stlil no match for the wind and I had to hold it from time to time as the gusts got REALLY bad. Finally I noticed some others had lowered just the back legs and kept the front legs in there top position creating an angled effect and effectively blocking the majority of the wind. I didn't have to hold it anymore as the wind was coming from the back and pushing the roof down .... so hard I noticed the bottom brace looked as if it could buckle and as I went to go get a bungee to tie it back for support I saw it give way. In haste I pulled bandit's crate right under the buckled area and it held the tent up for the remainder of the day. The Cross Brace bar had bent but not broken but the whole back wall was really flimsy now so I thought I'd have to toss it .... that was till I was walking around Home Depot and thought of a way to fix it.

At first I bought a 3 foot piece of Steele and a couple of metal screw clamps thinking I could cut the metal into two pieces and create a splint, clamp it on either end see if it would hold. The Parts were like $5 and I thought it would be better than asking the budget committee for a new tent. Anyway, I get this stuff home and it takes me a couple of weeks to actually pull it all out and play around with it and I realized I could make the repair and you really wouldn't notice it at all. We're already like the hillbilly Disc Doggers in the group and I figured it would be better if I didn't show up with a tent held together by beer cans and duct tape right ?

Ok ... WOW. We had wind ... we had a blast, We had OVER 100 TEAMS on Saturday ... we had a blast, It got cold on Sunday ... we had a blast. I think you can see the theme going on here. I'd personally like to thank all the CFDDC members for letting me take part and help run things this last weekend. There was certainly not only a wide array of Dogs this year but people drove from all over North America to get here. It was really cool making new friends this year and getting to know everyone. I had a woederful day and one of the four best seats in the house as I judged the Open and Intermediate Freestyle rounds and even tossed in a little line judging for the Novice Toss and Fetch rounds. I really love being a part of the competition and being the foot fault judge is great because everyone asks you questions and you HAVE to stay informed and involved. 

As for competition, I can't wait to see where we ended up but I have a feeling it's somewhere in the top ten. The wind was pretty stiff when I threw but it really didn't see to matter because I get to practice in similar situations quite frequently living right off Lake Eustis. I was able to snag 6 points in the first round and in any normal year that would have been close to the line for getting cut but with the "challenge" this weekend I was able to snag 7th. As we drew down to the end the sun was almost gone as I threw my last round and had a moderate 13.5 for my second round ending up with a 20.5 total for the day. In the world class competition I was up against I feel great as I put up a pretty good show. Congratulations to ALL the competitors for making this years CFFDC one of the best to remember. YOU ALL ROCK (Yes even you DiAno)