Thanks again to Jackie for giving me my first L5 judging opportunity – I thoroughly enjoyed it, and hope the teams did as well.

Our first search was one of the interior areas – a medium-sized room plus the foyer of the hall. The room contained some stacks of tables and chairs, as well as a table and a couple of chairs set up for the trial manager to use later. The foyer was a busier area, with a number of toilet and cupboard doors as well as a few items stacked around the edges. Their were five hides in total; two clove and three gun oil. The first was at the base of the wedged-open door at the start of the search area. Most dogs flew straight past this at the start, coming back to it later. This was found by all the teams. There was also a gun oil hide on one of the chairs stacked on the opposite side of the room. This was a higher hide, but well within reach of all the dogs. This was missed by a couple of teams, whose dogs indicated or showed interest on the surrounding chairs. Into the foyer, and there was another gun oil hide in a corner of two walls – I particularly enjoyed watching Honey pick this one up from the other side of the area and working into it. A clove hide was placed in the keyhole of a cupboard near the toilet doors. All the dogs found this one. The final hide was towards the bottom of the closed disabled toilet door. This was close to a cone that marked the area beyond which teams could reward. For whatever reason, none of the teams tasked their dogs into search the area around the door so nobody found it! Overall though, a good start to the trial for most.

Our second search was the exterior error. This was in a walkway between two buildings, with a small seating area at the end. I put out two clove hides and one gun oil. The first clove hide was under some matting on the floor towards the middle of the walkway – this stumped a couple of handlers, who I don’t think expected a floor hide! That said, all but one correctly called it. The second clove hide was at the bottom of a door on one of the buildings – the dogs needed to go onto a step to access this. This hide was missed by a couple of dogs, partly because of only coming at it from one direction, causing the dog to pull off the door in order to not walk into the fence in front of them! The final hide (gun oil) was on the edge of the seating area and was found by all the teams. A great confidence booster for a number of teams, with four of the six finding all three hides.

Finally we came back indoors. This time we were searching the majority of the main hall, plus a small lobby area. Two of each odour. One clove hide was halfway up a door in the lobby area – a little challenging for dogs used to searching lower. The next clove hide was on the door wedge keeping the lobby door open. On the other side of the hall, a gun oil hide was part way down a pillar with the final hide being on a chair in a line marking out the search area. Three of the six teams found all hides. Highlights included Bertie setting off at such speed that he nearly skidded into a wall, and the handbrake turns from a number of the dogs as they hit the odour on the chair!

Very well done to the teams that qualified.