9/25/05: Here he is at just shy of 9 months of age.

5/1/06: Kai has been at hunt training the past few months with Pat. We think he's ready to be shown at his first national specialty in field and conformation. Sandee's been practising with him.

5/6/06: Kai is an exuberant 17 month old, 70 pound male. On the first day of the speciality, 5/6, Sandee was getting ready to conduct the WC test with him. She and Kai were fifth in the running order and they were in a blind, a 4x6 fabric shield designed to prevent the dog from seeing the test before he runs it. This blind was at the top of a 20' fairly steep grassy slope that was slick with morning dew. The dog that was running the test ahead of Sandee and Kai was not able to find the 2nd bird (the "memory" bird) that he was supposed to pick up. He switched back to the location of the first bird (the "go" bird), thus failing the test. The other handler, realizing the dog had failed by switching, called for the gunner of the memory bird to yell "hey, hey, hey" to the dog. Normally this is fairly common and in fact the running dog did come back to the memory bird location.

But Kai, hearing the "hey, hey, hey", took that as a signal to get the bird as well. He went from 0 to 100 in about a tenth of a second, and Sandee was not able to release her hold on Kai's collar fast enough. She was whipped around the blind and sent flying down the hill, breaking her right arm and her left middle finger. The Speciality is over for Sandee.

5/11/06: Sandee had surgery today. It was worse than what the surgeon originally thought. The ball of the humerus at the shoulder had shattered into several smaller pieces. She had three screws and an unknown amount of wire in her upper arm. Recovery is measued in months. While Sandee is very upset, I am more philosophical: This could have been much, much worse. Fortunately we had wonderful support at the specialty and we managed to get our dogs groomed and shown with the help of our friends even under these extremely difficult conditions.

September 2006: Kai earns his JH. He trained with Pat Murphy at Northwest Performance Dog and after Kai 'broke the breeder' Pat handled Kai for us to finish his JH by end of summer. Sandee calls Kai our "good bad dog".

11/18/06: Today Kai scored BOW for a 3 point major. He's now at 9 points, having won WD at several 1 and 2 pt shows this summer.

11/19/06: Kai scores another 3 points in Monroe with BOB. That's now 12 points with both majors out of the way.

03/25/07: Kai scores another 2 points in Bremerton with BOW. That's now 14 points.

05/06/07: Kai scores his final point in Elma with BOW. A new champion.