I was lucky enough to compete in both the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge National Finals and Skyhoundz World FInals.

First up was the Skyhoundz Discdogathon World Finals, which was the biggest on record with over 100 teams attending.  Ez-ups were 3 deep in certain places around the field.  At the last chance qualifier we entered Slayte and Muse in several of the events.  Slayte qualified in bullseye with both Jenn and I!  Chuck Middleton and I qualified with BamBam in the pairs D/A.  Muse was already qualified in several events for the finals.

At the Discdogathon finals, Muse was on fire.  She fished top 10 in time trial and spot landing, 15th place in pairs d/a and 3rd in bullseye!  I finished 9th with Slayte in bullseye.  Chuck and I finished 5th in pairs d/a with BamBam.  Here are all 3 world finals bullseye rounds (we didn’t film any of the other rounds):

At the Purina IDC National Finals, Muse and I had our best freestyle round of the year so far.  We did our best and only had 1 miss, finished in 4th place.

It was a great week of disc doggin’ and will be one to remember for a long time.  Despite scoring big points in several events, having placements, competing on a huge stage and all of that – it wasn’t the highlight of the trip.  The highlight was Key suddenly being able to track and catch discs out of nowhere.  A week earlier she struggled to follow the disc and would jump erratically at high discs and would tumble while chasing low discs.  At 5 months, compared to Muse at that age, Key is faster, better catching ability, better tracking, stronger jumper and more stamina.  It’s hard to believe, but it’s true.  We compared her to videos of Muse at the same age.  Muse had better tug drive at that age, so that is still an area we are working on with Key.  This is just amazing and far and away was the best part of the whole trip:

A week later, we had our dogtoberfest event where Muse placed 2nd overall Saturday and won overall Sunday.  Jenn won toss/fetch event with her on Sunday!  She was in the awards photo for every event on Sunday, so that’s pretty impressive.  Enzo finished 5th overall both days.  Slayte had a solid outing and is loving disc every time he gets to compete now.  Key also made her debut in competition and was very impressive.  People are starting to refer to her as Keybot because of her similar performance to Muse (AKA Mubot) being a frisbee catching robot.  Most dogs at that age are just learning to catch, while Key is pursuing the discs and learning how to approach them.  You can see in some of the videos how she watches the disc, usually putting her head down as she follows it.