Your Society did a first this year – we were asked to run the CLA’s Open Scurry at the above fair.

It took a lot of organising – not least the camping (have we a wardrobe, where can we plug in our hairdryer, have we our own shower??) for some of the members who decided that camping for the weekend was marginally better than having to get up at 4.30am (yes AM!!!) to get into the grounds before the 8am deadline – good job we did after meeting the ‘bouncers’ on the Gundog Parking gate!!! For some of us it was it was a novel experience as not having camped for over 30 years - luckily the weather was fantastic with temperature in the high 20’s, clear blue skies and little wind for the whole of the weekend. (Not sure I would be quite so enamoured if it had been wet and windy especially as my tent got torn whilst we were putting it up!!)

The Open Scurry was a 2 dummy retrieve, both seen and quite a distance, - 1 on water and 1 on land. There was plenty of cover in the way of reeds in the river and trees, longish grass on land. To make it even more interesting we were allowed to put in a jump for the land retrieve, which proved to be quite testing for quite a number of the ‘Open’ Dogs. It took some dogs a while before they sussed out the layout, but that could have been down to the handlers! Despite the hot weather we were kept busy – over 300 had a go over the 3 days – all nationalities as there was an International team event as well as the Jubilee Working tests. In fact, on Sunday, a lady from Hungary with a Retriever won. She was well pleased and dashed off to Sally Mitchell’s stand to claim her prize - it made her visit to England complete.

We had many compliments on the set test from the competitors and they thanked us on the way we ran it. Which leads me to say a very big ‘thank you’ to all who gave up their time, in some cases their weekend (and sleep!) to help us make it a success. You know who you are and without you we could not have done it. Again, many many thanks to you all – your names are in my little black book for future events!