Equipment Cleanup

One thing about agility -- it's equipment intensive. Anybody loving to do agility with their dogs, better not mind hauling and mending equipment. Just setting up and taking down courses every couple of weeks is a chore if nobody shows up to help, and getting ready to put on a trial is WORK.
Yesterday 8 or 9 LCCOC agility folks met to clean equipment for our upcoming trial.  It was my first time participating in this activity, which included:

• Putting new numbers on every jump cup, from 4" through 26".  That's a lot of labels, which Nedra lazar printed off of her computer onto file folder labels, then cut into strips.  To make sure they would stick, every single jump cup had to be washed and thoroughly dried.  Tedious work, so we made an assembly line and it got done efficiently.
• Putting colored tape on the double and tripple bar jumps, a different color for each jump height.
• Retaping the bars where the tape is frayed.
• Bleaching and hosing the mildew off of every latice wing (about 30 of those), front and back.
• Repairing/replacing broken or missing jump cups.
• Hammering the uprights posts tightly onto the bottom cross bar, to ensure the jump bars make good contact with the jump cups.  Even glued, they tend to spread over time.  It's so unfair if the bar drops just from the wind of a dog going over.
• Repairing/replacing numbers on our 1-20 overturned flower pots.  These sit out in the weather and the rain and UV lighting eventually destroys the glue.  I took these home and will put clear tape over them.  These will be used for practice but Nedra bought 2 sets of cones for the trial.

Ken brought his pressure washer but couldn't get it started, so we just used a couple of 1 gallon sprayers to apply the bleach cleaner, let it sit 10 minutes, then hosed it off.  It worked pretty well.  Green mildew disappeared, wings are white as snow.  We also cleaned our plastic chairs, which were looking horrible.

Our trial is Easter weekend, and John and I took on the job of loading all the equipment onto the U-haul, delivering it to the arena, then hauling it back after the trial.  I hope we can muster all these good volunteers to help us out.

Upwards and onward!