The Irish Pointer Club held its summer grouse trials on the weekend of 15th & 16th August 2009. The first day was an Open Stake for pointers and a/v setter under IKC field trial rules and regulations. The judges for the day were Michael Houston, Patsy McCarthy and Tom O’Mahony.
We were promised a day of two halves on the weather front and that is exactly what we got. W 4 gusting 5, with fog and rain, sometimes heavy in the morning moderating to 2 sometimes 3 in the afternoon but bright sunshine even if still brisk.
In the poor conditions at the start birds were hard to find and even harder to pin. By the lunch break there was only one find in the book although birds had been encountered on a couple of occasions. The weather and the bird situation changed after lunch with conditions much better even if still brisk and several dogs had opportunities on grouse and snipe.
It has been a disappointment to me this year that if a dog doesn’t run it is most likely to be a pointer. This was the case today and I saw a couple of pointers that needed extreme handling to get them to go and can only sympathise with the people who were unfortunate enough to have to run against these noisy handlers. All the other dogs ran hard but as usual some were more effective than others. By this I mean that the dogs were covering ground, in some cases a lot of ground, but their ground treatment, I felt, left a lot to be desired and ground was missed. Obviously when there isn’t much game poor ground treatment can go unpunished but even allowing for this I still prefer my dog, in fact all dogs, to quarter their ground.
Result :-
1st F.T.Ch. Pallasgreen Herriott Jim Sheridan’s I.R. & W. Setter bitch. (Ex.)
2nd Toften’s Chris Des O’Neile’s Pointer dog. (VG)
3rd Sweet Erin J. Conway’s I.R.S. bitch. (VG)
4th Bone a Part Jimmy Dalton’s Pointer dog.
C.O.M. F.T.Ch. Jamail Adam Aidan Dunne’s I.R.S. dog.
This was one of those “It ain’t over till the fat lady….” Situations. I thought I had it won but in an extension to the second round, that I was in, I think, Jim Sheridan’s Herriott bitch had a find on a covey. Second to this bitch is no disgrace she is a class act. In his summing up Michael Houston said that the main thing splitting the major award winners was running but I would also make the point that the bitch was the only dog on the day to actually end up producing her birds so fair’s fair.
Basso.
Basso got two runs and it was a game of two halves. Michael subsequently told me that for long enough Basso was their top dog. It wasn’t just the running, it was the way he ran. For a start off as a medium sized dog he has a very fast action and he looks fast. He was built to run on hard open ground and if there is a better area on the Liffey head for him to run I have yet to find it. Getting the right conditions is one thing but actually doing it is another but he didn’t disappoint. So he was going like the clappers, doing beautiful lines, turning on the P of the peep and doing it all with a head high carriage. Our brace mate either missed or took a cut at a snipe and we were set aside.
The second run had all the power and style but on more broken ground, covered in deer chips, he looked decidedly messy.
Chris
Big Dog pleased me immensely. The hooligan that Ross put so much effort into last year is, literally, a different dog. Perhaps I have a bigger stick than Ross but probably the season’s shooting has a large part to play in his transformation. Once you become confident in your control the pressure is off. You let him go further because you know he will turn and in fact Chris will do it all on his own but the only problem with this is that his Sat. Nav. is calibrated for Denmark. We had a nice bit of ground for our first run and a nice dog to run against. One of Joe O’Sullivan’s Red Setters Gardenfield Loun. There may have been individual dogs that quartered their ground better than either of our dogs but I’ll suggest there were no two dogs together doing it like this. We ran hell for leather till we reached a stream running across our path. Just before being pulled up to cross the stream both dogs indicated game across the stream. On restarting on the other side Chris went away out on the left. On his way back rather than run forward of an obstacle he cut back downwind to avoid running in unhunted ground and pointed. Just about opposite where both dogs had indicated game on the other side. Two birds were produced but not seen by my nearest judge so no shot was fired. Happily the other two judges saw the game and a shot was fired over the dropped dogs.
Believe it or not ( the wife tells me it’s all downhill after seventeen) I can’t remember if he ran twice or three times but our last run, luckily enough was against another good quartering dog, one of Pat Dooley’s pointers and both dogs gave it a real go in good ground. Three hundred yards either side, relatively flat and hunting hard. It is difficult to describe the pleasure one gets when your dog does it well. It is even more difficult to describe the pleasure when both dogs do it well.
There were one of two reds that caught my eye. Aiden Dunne’s Jamail Adam ran well, Jim Crotty’s Maodog Fionn was another flier, if a tad left sided at times and Jim Sheridan’s Red & White Pallasgreen Herriott was almost perfection.
This was a good event for half the day due to the early inclement weather. No, it was an extremely good event and boy what would it have been like if we’d had the whole day nice? It is difficult to believe that this same ground yielded so little just a fortnight ago and so much today.
Jimmy Dalton’s Bone A Part is a Glencuan dog sired by Lisenaire Luke Skywalker X Exile on Main Street (Judy) so not a bad day for Glencuan all round.
