Fetch!

Today we had our lesson with Dave. He is pleased with how she's coming along holding her distance out from the sheep. So today we worked on fetching.
Kola has a much easier time going out on the Away-to-me (counter clockwise, or anti-clockwise to help you remember.) I think it might be because she's trained to walk on the right side and I've been adding the flanking commands to our walks so away-to-me I push her around the corner, rather than come-bye where she follows me around the corner.
I dont think she quite knows why she's supposed to stay out so far but I have hope that she'll figure it out. Her fetches ran the gambit from, "oh wow, my dog did that?" to "uhg, I cant believe my dog did that, again" and everything in between. She is pretty consistently slowing down at the top of her outrun, which pleases me. She really wants to cut in on her sheep though. This tends to send them into an unstable orbit around me rather than straight to me.
Dave suggests that we can work on our stops along the fenceline, that way the sheep are still between us when I ask for the down. I also picked up some tubing to throw in case Kola needs a little reminder of how it works. Its clear tubing and I am considering ways to decorate it. Right now it has rolled up pieces of paper that say things like "knock it off" in big letters. I thought it was cute. We'll see if anyone agrees.