Ray's VST

CT Daf-I-Dale's Talk Raydio VCD1 OA

Ray earned his Variable Surface Tracking title and became a Champion Tracker on November 11, 2007 at the Palo Alto Foothills Tracking Association test. Our judges were Darlene Barnard and Ralph Swingle. A good friend, mentor and tracking judge, Mitzi Young, apprenticed with the two judges and I consider her to be my third judge that day. Our track was 605 yards long and was 50/50 vegetation/non-vegetation. It was aged three hours.

Ray had a super start and took off confidently down the first leg. About mid-way he stopped to investigate some disturbance in the grass but quickly went back to the mad pace that had me jogging a bit to keep up. Our first change of direction was a meander to the right down the hill and away from the service road to a left turn in the grass. Ray was still moving quite quickly. The second turn was at the edge of the grass and went left across the sidewalk past the fountain. This, I was to later learn, was our Moment of Truth turn. I think his momentum from the previous section of the track pulled him up the stairs of the building and he searched that area for a bit. We backed up, he looked right but then went left. He started left and searched the nooks and crannies around the staircases but showed me "no track here" so I worked at backing up to the fountain where he had given me a good show of track. He then searched right and with this came the body language of "there's track here". Although his NV work on the pavement was not as sharp as it has been, he clearly showed me this was the direction. We were quickly rewarded with a metal article.
We continued down the sidewalk to a right turn back into the grass. Ray was hauling ass here too! In fact, his grass work was awesome - very accurate and left me with no doubts about whether he was correct in his decisions. The next leg cut diagonally through a road, sidewalks and grass to another grass leg. This leg has a cloth article which looked like a piece of paper from my perspective at the end of the line. Ray gave me a nice indication, I picked it up then started to get nervous - OMIGOD we're getting close!

We went another short distance on grass to the final turn which was at the edge of the sidewalk just before the parking lot. I thought perhaps we still had the moment of truth turn to contend with and a parking lot is the usual place for that. Ray started across the parking lot and investigated an empty bag of cheetos - gotta love 'em. He broke off and searched the concrete bumpers on the edge of the parking lot. He swug back on the sidewalk and I backed up to give him space to work. At this point, I looked to the left and there, off in the distance, was a blue plastic thing. I had a lot of confidence that we were going to do this as there was only about 50 yards more to go. I let Ray work out this scenting problem with many concrete blocks, road, parking lot, grass. He wound around and I patiently waited for him to get back to the track. And there it was - blue plastic has never looked so good! It was 25 minutes from start to finish

I couldn't pick up the article - well I picked it up but didn't present it to the judges. I was overwhelmed with so many emotions. I came to my senses, waved the blue plastic lid and was surrounded by my friends, fellow trackers and judges, most of which fall into more than one of those catagories!

It's been an incredible journey to train with Ray Ray. So many things I love about him one of which is his drive to "find it". My mixed emotions are these. I'm sad that we've come to the end of this journey because I don't really want it to end, I'm elated that we accomplished a dream started years ago, overwhelmed at my love of this dog. Ray is so fun to track and he'll continue to track - just not things he doesn't like (asphalt!). He has never quit on me, has never yawned and told me "not today", and has always put a little FUN into his work. He is the best part of our team.

Thank you, Ray, for what you've taught me. I'm sorry for the horrible mistakes I made with your training, sorry you had to be my Novice A dog, but I'm proud to be able to call you my partner.