OK, this is a personal e-mail that Pascale did not intend for public consumption.  However, there are some nuggets of training hints here, and lessons about the best laid training plans coming apart (a little) at the test.  Oh, she's proud of her dog, and I'm proud of both.  Again, I can take no credit for Tilou, he's not "mine."  Pascale's beautiful English is her second language.  I never notice anymore, but there are some subtle things like the order of words that might seem odd.

"I had trained Tilou in knee to hip high hay with pheasant, but when I got to the test site the grass was 5 inches high.  They told us that they would use chukar because of the height of the grass, pheasant having too high of legs to leave a sent-track...  I had done no training in that, HAAA!  I was freaking out.  Also people that ran on Friday all got a 1 or no points on tracking...  At the end of the day I knew I did pretty good in the field and in the water, but I was confused about the tracking...  So during the tracking, Norman Prima (Sr judge from Florida) told me to get my dog and leave the field.  I thought I was cooked as I didn't know where the chukar went... the cover was a gully between two fields where the chukar went to hide, not hard serious cover with cedars and bushes (forest like) as Tilou was use to it...  I guess that Tilou saw a psychological barrier at the gully...  He did the track to perfection, nose to the ground, but when he got to the gully he stopped and went down to get his wind (beautiful use of nose btw) and then he started to search...