With the weather as it’s been and the higher temperatures it was a difficult call yesterday evening. However i made the decision to go ahead and notified the teams in advance of our contingency plans, so a massive thank you to all the teams.
We had plenty of cloud and a nice breeze throughout the evening. We changed the running order and made use of the two indoor areas so both the indoor searches took place first. It was much cooler by the time the outdoor searches took place – we used the rear patio fence
and made use of the paved area in front of the doctors surgery next door for the exterior items. We have used this outdoor area on several occasions as it provides us with more options for searches – vehicles, walls etc and allows us to offer many different searches.
Thank you to Hayley and Deborah for judging and our usual very helpful team.

Judges Report

Hayley Whitaker
Thank you to Susan for inviting me to judge and to her great team for all of their support, especially Gill who was my scribe for the evening.
I judged boxes and luggage first and then the wall search later in the evening as it cooled down.
BOXES/LUGGAGE: I think it threw a lot of people (me included) that they entered the hall via the fire exit instead of the main doors! Both hides were on the right hand side of the search area. One hide was in the zip of the black suitcase and the other on the colourful box at the back of the search area. Most teams found both hides with the box being found first by most teams. Jean and Woody were super fast in this area but there were so many great teams on show. The second item took a bit longer for many dogs, I suspect as it was such a warm evening and the dogs were getting tired quickly.
WALL: Given the dogs were tiring quickly I tried to set a fairly straightforward search with both hides within the first two thirds of the wall. However, the wind was blustery and with the warmth of the day the odour was travelling a long way from source which threw quite a few dogs off. Emily with Maisie and Michaela with Skye did some lovely methodical searches and Hilary and Acer were just amazingly fast! Lucy and Nora worked the space really thoughtfully and it was just unfortunate they didn’t find the odours. Freddie really made Leanne work for the second find but they found it which was impressive.

It’s always lovely when everyone qualifies and it was great to see so many happy teams. Particular congratulations to those that placed and got clean sweeps as that was a real achievement given the weather.