I just love our Ms. Stoker, but I'm not sure she is a girl that most Portuguese Fisherman would have had much patience with. She's a bit of a diva, not terribly focused, has lots of energy that is difficult to channel and is a sensitive soul that is hyper-aware of her environment. She does love to swim, is food-motivated, an eager retriever and has no problem flinging herself off a boat - attributes that made it easy to breeze through her Apprentice Water Dog (AWD) and Working Water Dog (WWD) titles. She's a girl of many contrasts in other areas too, but there isn't space here to go into that!Unfortunately, we've been stuck in Courier training for a few years now. Two bad training sessions where she lacked understanding of what I wanted and where we had equipment problems (causing a constantly shifting sight picture/context...) and we hit a wall in water training. We did some recreational swimming and retrieving and I would put her up on the boat platform with me from time to time to see where her head was at. It was not a pretty picture. She would turn away from me and shiver, going from happy play retrieves off the shore to shut down and pathetic on the boat in the snap of a finger.
This spring, she happily decided that maybe she could do some easy jumps off the boat with me on the platform next to her. We've had about six training sessions at the water so far since then and I am so excited that Stoker wants to play again. With a better understanding of how little pressure Stoker can take in training and what she thinks IS pressure, I am enjoying the challenge of figuring out how to "explain" the Courier exercises to our little silver fox girl. We're not setting any real goals for now, just exploring the Courier level exercises from Stoker's point of view and enjoying the journey.
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