On 16 Feb, we hosted 2 trials – Level 4 in the morning and Level 3 in the afternoon. Pippa Bentham had kindly agreed to judge and to help things go smoothly, I volunteered as second judge. Pippa was happy to let me judge the outside searches and due to the lack of volunteers I was judge and scribe at the same time – which actually worked fine (apart from forgetting to stop the stopwatch once, realising about 10 seconds late). It was great to see a number of familiar faces and everyone was used to trials – with a lot of the competitors having done a Level 4 trial previously. On the car search, a couple of handlers called the find higher (more than 6 inches) above the location (door seal) as they had big dogs and the scent had drifted up. On the exterior search, a lot of competitors found both scented articles, with the ones that didn’t “falling” for the vanilla scented distraction. Unfortunately Buster (and Chris) was shattered by that time and wasn’t working at all, so he unfortunately didn’t qualify. Well done Janet (and Jess) for winning – even without a voice (suffering from a bad cold)!

After a short break, we started the Level 3 trial – again with vehicles first. Not having a small dog as competitor was novel, and it allowed me to place the scents a bit higher than usual (in both Levels) on the cars. About half of the competitors were unlucky for one reason or another, calling one wrong alert in the cars, however, none of them failed to qualify overall. On the exterior items, all but Kay (and Lola) found both items and overall it was a successful afternoon. I would like to give a special mention to Maria (and Liberty), who came second and Maria has worked wonders with the little pooch – having seen and judged them previously, she has come on tremendously!