Captial District Retriever Club, Schoharie County, NY

It has been my dream to start a retriever club in this area since I first bought my land in Schoharie County13 years ago in 1995. I came to this area and saw ponds every where. A dogs trainers dream. I talked to the soil conservation people and found out the soil content was all clay, and you did not need a permit to dig a pond. A retriever persons DREAM. Six years ago Dave Graf from the Long Island Retriever Club bought property in the town of Root. Dave and I are kind of the charter members for the club. In April of 2004, I moved from CT to here. Then next step was to attract retriever people to the area, which has happened slowly. So now we have the people and the grounds it is time to get the club going. Currently we have almost 500 acres being groomed for retrievers training within 20 minutes of each other.

I have gotten the approval from the AKC for the name of the club. The next step is to incorporate as a non profit organization which I hope to have done by April 2008. We should be ready to start accepting checks for Bill Eckett's seminar which I hope to give us the seed money for the club.

On Easter weekend on 2008 Dave Graf was up working on a beautiful pond he just built last year. He signed the incorporation papers so we can send them to attorney. I asked Dave at this point, could I insure his place to have training sessions at his place also. So without having to ask anybody else we have over 190 acres to have training sessions on already for 2009.

Our plans for the club will be the Bill Eckett seminar for 2008, Traning sessions for spring 2009 2 or 3 in March and at least 2 in April. I hope to run 2 sanction trial in 2009 and maybe some kind of training seminar in 2009.Once we do that we will take stock of our membership and the people we have to work with and then apply for a AKC license trail the following year.