Short report on the National Open Shooting Dog Championship
While a judge watches, Shawn Kinkelaar shoots over Ridge Creek Cody just seconds after the covey flushed.
Besides the opportunity to train on a quail plantation, a compelling reason to live in southwest Georgia for a winter is its proximity to lots of cool dogs and field trials. The most prestigious horseback shooting dog trial, The National Open Shooting Dog Championship, began February 4 on the historic and beautifully groomed Sedgefields Plantation, just outside Union Springs, Alabama. Fortunately for me, Jim and Kathy Tande invited me to ride a morning with them.
You know you’re in bird dog country when a life-sized, bronze statue of a pointer (sculpted by Bob Wehle) that’s mounted on an 8-foot-tall column graces the middle of a main intersection of town; and when that town, Union Springs, claims to be the “Bird Dog Field Trial Capital of the World.”
Jim and Kathy Tande graciously offered me one of their horses so I could ride a morning brace of the National Open Shooting Dog Championship.
Betsy and I have known Jim and Kathy for a long time—going back to our years as competitors on the grouse trial circuit. Jim and Kathy still have a place in northern Minnesota but now winter near Arlington, Georgia, where Jim trains, competes in horseback field trials and is a sought-after judge.
This trial, now celebrating its 53rd anniversary, is unique in that dogs must quality by placing in specific trials and each brace is 90 minutes. Most of the handlers are professionals but a few amateurs compete, enticed perhaps, by the $10,000 purse. The birds here are bobwhite quail—all wild coveys—and are plentiful due to excellent management at Sedgefields.
Shawn Kinkelaar has an impressive string of championship dogs including Covey Rise Offlee Amazin, Skydancer Dancing Bell, Miller’s Atomic Rain and Ridge Creek Cody, the setter in the front.
This year 47 pointers and five setters competed. In a strange bit of kismet, Paul Hauge, Betsy and I bred two of the setters. CH Ridge Creek Cody (owned by Larry Brutger and handled by Shawn Kinkelaar) and Land Cruiser Scout (owned by Mike Cooke and handled by Jeanette Tracy) were littermates out of CH Can’t Go Wrong and CH Houston’s Belle in 2008.
Defying even more odds, Cody and Scout were in the same brace! Both dogs hunted hard, looked good running and scored a back. They each tallied four covey finds and stood staunch as their handlers fired blank .410 shotguns. Neither dog placed on this day…but I was very proud of them both.
Sedgefields Plantation built a very nice clubhouse that’s used for The National Open Shooting Dog Championship.