Dogs and Logs

bff Audrey and I drove up to Stillwater, MN today (Sunday) to catch the finals of the Dogs and Logs DockDog World Championships.  My friend Sue Meyer and her 9-year-old German Shorthair Pointer Tanner of Team MyTDog, qualified in the Big Air competition, so we’d come to cheer them on in the finals.

Sue and Tanner in front of loggers doing ‘the creation of adam’

Sadly, they didn’t make the finals (results are available here).  This is Tanner’s last year competing and even if he and Sue weren’t friends of ours, we’d have been rooting for him.  He’s a beautiful, sweet-natured, athletic, highly-disciplined dog.  Just my type.

 

Audrey and I enjoyed the event even more than we thought we would.  The folks who put this event together did an absolutely fantastic job.  The DockDogs events (big air, extreme vertical and the new speed retrieve event) were interspersed with the Stihl Ironjack World Championship events (chop, saw, climb, axethrow, crosscut, boom run), which kept the action moving at a pace that left us unable unwilling to leave our seats.

 

Here are a few pics of the event, taken with my pocket digital.  Sorry for the so-so quality.

 Blast off!

Acrophobics need not apply

Hang time

 They all stayed dry!

The logging championship was, I must say, as entertaining to watch as the dockdogs competition.  The men competing were incredible athletes – strong, quick and agile with amazing endurance.  I think it was the fellow who won the overall world championship who, in his acceptance speech – thanked his orthopedic surgeon and chiropracter.  Yup.  Considering the fact that these guys climb high, run fast, walk on water — and do most of it with very sharp things in their hands — that made perfect sense.

The dogs who took honors in the DockDogs finals didn’t make speeches.  They mostly just grinned and cavorted at their owner’s feet while they accepted the trophies.  I had the distinct impression that, lovely as they were, those trophies meant nothing to the dogs.  They were just there to enjoy the journey — and were therefore winners, every one of them.