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Make a channel weave

Sasha has been learning to weave through the plastic v-weave and the upright poles.  One problem we've encountered is that she tends to jump through the poles and there's a definite lack of smoothness to her style!

To counter this I thought we'd have a go at making a channel weave with odd bits found in the garden shed.  The channel weave uses two rows of poles  side by side so that to start with the dog is simply running between lines of poles. There are some good clips on YouTube which show how to start training with this type of weave.    I've also included a clip of Sasha having a go at this type of weave.
 

To start with I took the poles out of two really cheap windbreaks.  They cost about £1 for each windbreak from the pound shop so each pole only cost me 25p.  This is bank holiday Monday and I want to make the weave now, so I'm not going to wait for stuff to be delivered from ebay. 
 

Then I wanted some spacers.  You can just measure out the distances between the poles but I can assure you you'll soon get fed up with this.  I found some curtain rings in a cupboard and some orange safety tape. You can get these bits from any DIY place such as Homebase.  I tied the orange tape to the curtain rings so that the rings were approximately 38" apart from each other.  I made two lengths of the spacers with four rings on each.  

Finally I put the channel weave together with two lines of four poles hammered into the ground with a mallet.  The poles are offset so that the ones on the right hand side fall between the ones on the left hand side.  Sasha was a bit puzzled by this arrangement at first but she got the hang of it after two or three goes.  I was soon able to bring the lines of poles in much closer together and it has had the desired effect of stopping her from jumping through the weave.   Don't forget Sasha has already done quite a bit of weaving so your dog will take much longer to learn if you're starting from scratch.

Interestingly Jamie came out of the poles after he had counted to six.  He was expecting six poles in his own garden and six poles he was going to do.  At the training classes he does twelve and at shows he's learned to do however many poles there are in the ring. 

Here's a couple of clips I've found on Youtube that illustrate how to use the channel weave.  In the first one the Australian cattle dog and handler are going well until the dog is asked to come at the weave from an angle.  Then it all goes wrong.  Sasha does exactly the same thing.  She's not experienced enough yet for that sort of caper so we're keeping to straight lines of obstacles until she's thoroughly learned the weave. 

Here's Sasha having a go a the v-weaves.  You can see how excitable she is and how quiet I have to be when I'm training her.  Too much whizzing around and she just loses it.  Nevertheless she's very attentive and obedient most of the time and she obviously wants to learn.  The channel weaves seemed to stop her jumping through the weave poles and I would give these a go first if I was starting again with another dog.