We passed

Finally! Tristan passed his BH today. What a relief and what a long time coming. It only took the threat of a snow storm for Tristan to realize he was going to have to keep doing it until we got it right. Here's the big boy with some snow on his nose. He's looking pretty serious but it's only because he wants to get back to romping in all that white stuff.
The BH went pretty well. We didn't do as well as our practice run yesterday but Tristan stayed with me the whole way. I thought the heeling could have been tighter. The judge noted that Tristan actually heels better off lead. He does and I'm lucky for that. All the heeling in SchH1 and beyond are off lead. The only major glitch was Tristan broke his sit out of motion and started toward me when he should have waited for me to come back to him. His recall from the down out of motion was great as always. He loves tearing down the field to me and then screeching to a sit in front. The judge mentioned I gave hand signals for the sit and down out of motions although Tristan was doing the commands anyway. I'm totally oblivious that I do it so that's on my practice fix list.

I'm looking forward to working on Tristan's SchH1. I've always felt that the BH would actually be the hardest for us. It's because the BH is all about obedience and once I could get Tristan to heel correctly then we had a chance. Tristan is great at tracking and protection and obedience is our biggest challenge.