Congratulations to Jeremy and Gunner on passing their APLA Certified Pointer test yesterday in Okoboji. Gunner is out of Belle's 1st litter and is a senstational hunter. Most of my close followers have probably already heard stories about him, but he is fun to watch out in field! This is an old picture of Gunner in his younger years at about 5-6 months of age when he got his first taste of waterfowl hunting. (Hopefully I'll get a picture of Gunner and his 1st of many ribbons to come when he is here for the week) He was already retrieving goose and ducks out of the water at 5 months age and holding a steady point on wild birds. From then on my brother knew he had a special dog! Anyway I'll get back to the subject, Gunner passed his CP on his very first attempt in some very tough conditions. Yesterday was dry, windy, and hot, but he was definately up to the challenge. The waterfowl portion of the test was extremely tough becuase of the windy conditions and a lot of other dogs were fooled by the decoys floating in the pond, but Gunner is used to this type of a set-up and did exactly what he was supposed to do. I went along to watch and once I saw the whole process was wishing I was there with Belle. It was fun to sit back and watch as a bystander and hear all the positive comments from other people in the gallery talking about how great a looking dog Gunner is and how well he worked in his water retrieves! This was the first time my brother and I had seen the APLA set-up and was a great learning experience for us to see how the other levels (Advanced, Senior, and Master Pointing Retriever) are run for future tests. Jeremy strongly considered running Gunner in the Advanced this weekend as well, but decided to wait until next fall. Gunner just turned 2 years old on May 2 and is off to a good start in his young career. Hopefully this weekend I will be running Gunner in his first NAHRA hunt test set-up if everything works out!
