Thank you to Heather for inviting me to judge the Level 5 at Finmere.
I arrived at Finmere to see the last few minutes of the Level 3 trial and then Heather introduced me to my scribe Yaz. It was nice to see some familiar faces as well as some new ones. We started off on the Interior Search 1 which was in half of the hall plus the committee room. Although it was open I did not put a hide in this room but on the trolley near to its entrance. As expected many spent to long searching this area and ignored the rest of the search area. One team managed to find all 5 hides, with most of the others on 4. The next search was the Exterior and I reduced the size of the area so that it represented an area where 4 hides could be hidden with enough time to find them. Unfortunately no team found all four with most finding 3. The final search was Interior 2 which was the second half of the hall plus the chair/Table cupboard. It was good to see the dogs work hard to find the hides even though at least 1 in each section was quite hard. Like a team Yaz and myself spoke at the end of the search to clarify we agreed on how many were found and if any false alerts/deductions. The competitors were informed of their finds on the way out of the area.
Once again I would like to thank Heather for asking me to Judge and a big thanks to Yaz my scribe who must have been tired after a very long day.
Nigel Wilkes Judge

The first trial at Finmere since lock down so it was good to have a run through to see how things would go. We were fortunate that the weather was good and that competitors didn’t mind waiting outside during the ‘interior’ searches and waiting inside, all ‘masked up’, whilst the exterior searches were judged.
A big thank you to Yaz Whitehall for judging your very first ‘face to face’ (mask to mask!) trial and judging the L3’s in the morning. Yaz stayed on and scribed in the afternoon so a very long day and thank you Yaz for your contribution as always with the trials at ‘Finmere’.
Melanie scribed the L3’s in the morning, allowed us to use her vehicle for the L3 vehicle search and also helped inputting the results on the master score sheet. Thank you Melanie for helping once again and it was lovely to see you.
Nigel arrived nice and early to judge the L5’s and set some challenging L5 searches. I witnessed some very good performances and it seemed that some dogs were fatigued after trialling yesterday whilst others just had that bit of bad luck on the day. Thank you Nigel judging for me which I believe was for the very first time.
Heather Donnelly (Trials Manager)