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Westminster:Taking a Chance
MBIS Ch Caitland Isle Take a Chance NA NAJ almost missed the chance to compete at Westminster. His owner, Nancy Resetar, was so thrilled at receiving a formal invitation to WKC that she failed to read all the details of the invitation thoroughly. While pay- ing bills on the evening of December 1, she came across and read the full contents of the packet: The invitational entry had closed that afternoon at 3 p.m.
Oops. Nancy was worried, to put it mildly, whether Chance would be able to compete at WKC. “It would have been such a shame to miss this opportunity after having the honor of receiving an invitation,” she says. “What I remember most is that I did not know for two to three weeks if Chance’s entry had been accepted. I kept thinking positive and continued to move for- ward with my plans to go. I did not want to think that because I had messed up, Chance would not be able to compete.” Happily, Entries on Time came through and the rest is history—BOB and Herding Group 2, the best showing yet for an Aussie at the Garden.
Nancy Resetar was drawn to Aussies the first time she met them. Even though she had owned cattle dogs for a
very long time, “the fact that (Aussies) were so versatile and smart, yet silly and loving at the same time” helped clinch her conversion. Even before she owned one, Nancy would follow her Aussie friends to agility trials, to Kathy Warren stockdog clinics, and to the USASA Nationals in Bakersfield.
It was at Bakersfield that she saw Chance’s granddam Patches (Friend’s Blue Country) win Best Brood Bitch with Chance’s sire Chip (Blue Isle’s Sure I’m Famous) and his uncles Thad (Blue Isle’s To Hold a Dream) and Calypso (Blue Isle Dancin on Fayble Hill). “At that point, I was already hooked,” she says, “and I decided that I wanted a show dog that I could also train in agil- ity and work on stock.”
When Nancy’s last cattle dog was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma, her friend Maggie Gulledge began passing on all her old Journals and Aussie Times. “Look at those Caitland dogs, aren’t they beautiful?” Nancy remembers her saying. She agreed. “I remember imme- diately being drawn to the look of Cathy Bishop’s dogs,” she says.
After her cattle dog died, she was finally ready to look for her first Aussie.
“This was a big move for me, after owning only cattle dogs for over 30 years,” she says, “and I was very ner- vous about my decision at first. I even wondered if I could ever really fall for an Aussie after owning cattle dogs.” That, she says, changed the day she held Chance for the first time.
As she had never had never owned a show dog before, Nancy relied on help from her friends. “Through Maggie, I was introduced to Kristin Rush,” she says. “I
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