22 April 2009

Hunua Horse Trial 21/22 Feb

Speaking of useless, OMG! I am terrible! I cost us 2nd place :(

I had been going out & having fortnightly lessons with Angela. This has involved changing how I ride & getting Flynn straight, not letting him go out through the right shoulder anymore. Well this has been so good for us, we have more elevation again & very strong powerful trot (when he's not being cocky & evading me by trotting off & ignoring me!!)

Weather was diabolical all week heading into the HT & I was starting to get really nervous with Flynn having no back shoes on with the wet slippery ground. Lucky for us, we were 4th to go in the dressage before it all got too cut up, so he did a lovely dressage test, think from memory it put us 7th? I then raced over to the Sjing and managed to go 2nd, again, trying to avoid slipping over in the mud after too many people had gone through. It was so murky & yuck that it was a real effort for Flynn to pull his legs out of the mud & unfortunately he took a rail in the double. However this was good enough to move us up to 3rd as everybody had many, many rails. So glad we went early!!

Sunday was an early morning as I'd managed to find a farrier to put back shoes on Flynn so that I could whack in the biggest studs I could find. Went and warmed up & decided that it might be safest to jump down the outside line on the fences as the middle was going to be pretty cut up by the time our class got out on to the course. Turned out this was a good idea and Flynn jumped around clear with no loss of footing or anything. However, by saying he jumped around clear, I mean he jumped every jump I put him at. And unfortunately coming out of the water, I thought the roll top was for Pre Novice, so literally pulled him out of it, including saying to him "no Flynn not this one". Wasn't until I walked over to watch the Pre Novice and saw they weren't doing that jump, that I realised that duh, it was mine & I should have jumped it after all. Went back to the board & sure enough, we had a lovely big E next to our name. Which is a shame as the person sitting 2nd in front of us had run outs & we would have finished up in 2nd place at our first Horse Trial back. Mel had very nicely come out & taken photos for me, however it also meant she had to put up with me cursing & swearing and kicking stones all day LOL Thanks Mel for putting up with me!!More photos to come

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