Charlie

Charlie was my first own dog. I got him when i was 14 after begging for more than 1 year. He was a Sheltie from a really cool kennel ("von der Haunimühle"), his sisters Chili from Hans Fried and Crazy Rio from Kriszta Kabai are still running on the top of the agility world. Until he was 3 years he was totally crazy in agility, never doing contacts and only doing tunnels in competition - of course HE had fun. I must admit i was disappointed at this time, his sisters were already running at the highest levels and we were still a very chaotic team.

 Then 2 things happened, Charlie grew up a bit (in his mind :P) and I read about Silvia Trkmans Running Contacts and her whole training. It was hard but I decided to take the risk and retrain his contacts -  it was the best thing i could do.
From this point everything went better, and we finally grew into a team.

 We developed to one of the top medium teams in our land. Our major success was a 5th place at European Open finals and qualifying for World Championship 2012 in individual and Team.

Beside from agility he was a perfect dog, he went everywhere with me, - even to university and was even a little bit boring in everyday-life, but if we got to do anything he was giving 120%.
He taught me so many lessons, how not to let someone narrow your ideas and plans, to try new things and of course - that dogs cant be too big for running contacts!!!

In february 2013 all these things changed.
While i was away for one week, Charlie died in our pool. Nobody has an explanation how this happened, he was only 6 years old.

Now - I still think of him every evening and ask myself: would he like Zookie - I guess she would have got on his nerves :D

I still miss him a lot and can't stop wishing he was still here with me - but I guess he's somewhere now with 1000s of dogwalks and sheltie girls.