An "Experimental" Track!

As I was beginning to lay the track.............am I nuts, or what?! Here comes another one...

This is almost the same track that Reese did yesterday; the same one I laid for Reese, but with two slight variations. The thoughts behind this track, are at the end of these five pictures. Above is the second hay bale, bad boy Blast had jumped up on the first one, this one he ignored. We are on the 2nd leg.

I changed the second corner, third leg, and the third corner, fourth leg on this track. Blast did seem to waiver around on each somewhat, but then the wind was also blowing from 37 to 50 km. at this time. So it was not really possible to accurately determine if the wind was causing this, or if he was picking up on our track from yesterday (which was walked 3x). Above, he is trying to go to the groundhog holes, which Reese did not! Good girl, bad boy scenario.

This is the leg where Reese was actually over on this side, and her track was on the left side of this bale; she got back over to it before reaching this bale. Blast's was laid where he is, further back, he was trying to go over to the left side. At this time, the strong winds were coming from the right. Who knows?!!!

They both completed this track in a similar fashion, and curious, that both had the "issue" on the same leg.

Blast retrieving his glove after the track. We did a few throws and tugged, until I remembered this was actually one my "good" gloves.
SO THIS WAS THE EXPERIMENT:

I had a debate with myself this morning, the nice thing about this, I always win...

The U.S. List had some recent posts about some dogs doing better on 'older' tracks than fresh tracks; I tend to agree. Also, for trials, tracks are plotted the day ahead of the test. This means there are usually 3 people walking the same track, the judge, the tracklayer, and the equipment person. And sometimes, they might change the plan part way through. So, you have a heavy laid track by different people on one day, the next day the plotted track is walked by the tracklayer.

Today was Blasts' turn to track, and out of curiosity, I decided to go back to Reese's track, re-walk it, making changes on two of the legs, and see how Blast did. Certainly not 'scientific' but I was curious. Also, conditions were very different. Taking this into mind, I still found it very interesting. Didn't really come up with much, he did ok on the track, but might be interesting to try another time when the conditions are pretty much the same. I wonder if anyone else has tried this.