September
, 2010 Hunt Test
Des
Plaines Fishing & Wildlife Area, Wilmington, IL
Over
the years we have built this one day Hunt Test from meager entries
into a profitable event- consistently running two courses. However,
this year would be totally different. The whole weekend was filled
with 5 possible passes during one weekend. Two other pointing
dog clubs would come together to pull entries...and they did!
Many pros came in to run multiple dogs in the Senior and Master
level, which caused those clubs to hardly take any junior dogs.
As a result our test started to fill up quickly as we accepted
all the junior dogs and turned away no one including the Senior
and Master entries.
At our drawing we had 71 dogs
entered with 14 braces of Master, 10 Braces of Senior and 12 braces
of Juniors. Then, the Sunday before the event we began to be notified
of the dogs that qualified their titles, dogs that were moving
up into the next level, and dogs that were not going to continue
on that weekend. Thus, our original running order and set braces
would inevitably change as we shifted and moved around braces.
Thank you to Andriana who on Sunday night posted all the changes
to the running order. Of course you can’t plan on everything
to go smoothly as we found out on our first Master Brace that
took 1 hour! The major glitch in the whole hunt test were the
grounds in which the dogs had to run. We had been in contact with
Des Plaines Conservation since early July reminding them to mow
certain areas which are needed in order to have a viable set up
for the dogs. They did mow a path along the fence line, and a
few other paths, however they did not mow any bird fields for
us. But alas, we had great weather. On Monday our counts went
down to 63 from the original 71 entered. We had 12 Braces of Master
Dogs, 9 Braces of Senior Dogs and 11 Braces of Junior Dogs of
which the following qualified: 6 master dogs, 8 Senior dogs and
10 Junior dogs. The judges were fantastic as were our line marshals.
However, another hiccup occurred when one of judges, Joe Delaney
fell off of his horse and was taken to the hospital. Thankfully,
Joe is doing fine now and will be back on a horse soon. But we
still needed a judge to finish the remaining braces. Sharon Fitzpatrick
answered the call and we were back up and running again! We finished
around 4-4:30 with plenty of time for our out of state participants
to get home after their long weekend.
I
would like to send out special thanks to the following, as without
your hard work and efforts we could not have pulled off this event:
Hunt Test Committee: Valerie Blaine, Lorie and John Connell, Susan
Gervais, Aaron Whitfield, Kim and Doug Frank who allow us to use
their ATV year after year, and to their daughters, Cameron and
Tory for walking all the dogs and helping in the kitchen! Gunners:
Dennis Nowak, Brad Lepoudre, John Connell, Jeff Engelsman and
Rick Foerner. Line Marshall: Lorie Connell kept the braces coming
to the line. Food: Susan Gervais Served lunch with a warm smile.
Judges Scores/Ribbons: Julie Callison and Valerie Blaine. Bird
planting: Aaron Whifield, Doug Frank, Colin DePrez, John Connell.
Hats off to our Judges: Adam DeLude, Joe Delaney, Charles Dosenbach,
Paul Kosowski and Sharon Fitzpatrick. A huge thank you to Julie
Callison who handled all that computer “stuff” prior
and during our Hunt Test, we’d be lost without you.
Lastly, I wanted to send a “congratulations”
to young Junior Handler Tyler Callison and his young dog JNEK
Max and Ty’s Emerald Girl “Chloe” who he ran
for the first time in Juniors and earned a qualifying ribbon…that’s
what this is all about!
- Submitted by Kathy Engelsman
