Day 6 – Flight B – Test 4 – Mallard Pond-Land/Water – Thursday, October 22

Flight B: Dale Langhorne and Ed Sullivan

Mallard Pond-Land/Water – Land/Water Triple, Double Blind, Walk-up

Mallard Pond which is a Land/Water Triple with a double blind and a walk-up. The walk-up is bird number one. This bird is on the handler's right and is thrown to the left, landing 31 yards from the line landing in the woods. Bird two is up the middle at 85 yards, a duck flyer shot to the left, landing in the water with a splash or the grass cover at the edge of the pond. Bird three is on the left at 65 yards, thrown to the left, resulting in a splash in the pond. Water blind number one has a 50 yard angle entry. Then they had to parallel the peninsula under the arc of the go-bird at 100 yards. Blind number two is on the side of a hill, directly in front of the mat, under the arc of the flyer at 100 yards. The Judge's instructions are to pick up one bird, then run the water blind. After that blind is completed, the handler is to pick up the remaining two marks and finish with the land blind.

Flight B set up their third test late in the afternoon. There were 87 dogs called back. We watched eight dogs, before this test wrapped up for the afternoon. All of them picked up the marks clean. The whistles on the blinds ranged from 2-6 as the handlers kept their dogs on a tight line to the blind. In fact, we counted the total whistles for eight dogs running a total of 16 blinds and the number was 68 – that calculates into an average of 4.25 whistles per blind.