Jump!
We decided to have some fun with the girls on Saturday. We joined the newly created Myerscough Riding Club and entered the 75cms jumping. This was great, except that I left Nick’s jacket hanging up outside Jad’s stable and Andrea had to do an emergency dash to deliver it. Leah was thoroughly excited about a trip out which meant she was a complete pain to tack up when we got there. Fortunately being a tiny little 14h3 she’s not too difficult to keep hold of, although she tries to stamp on feet a lot. We got her ready and I disappeared to the warm up so Nick could get Puk ready in peace.
As ever, someone had been putting the practice jump up to 3ft for a 75cms class. It’s pathetic. I had to get off Leah, put the jump down to a reasonable size and then get on again to jump it. After 10 minutes trotting and cantering, we did a couple of jumps we were ready to go in. She doesn’t take much warming up really. She was brilliantly good fun in the class, she popped over everything although we did get 4 faults for a stupid stop that wasn’t really a stop but did break the rules… one of the fences faced towards the big doors to the arena. Parked right outside this was the ambulance. Leah thinks that ambulances are a lot more exciting to look at than fences and she refused to ride towards it. This meant that I had to circle to come into the fence she was supposed to be doing. Apart from that it was a lovely round.
Nick had problems at exactly the same fence. Puk did a beautiful round up to that point but then was eliminated by having 2 refusals. I think that it’s a real shame that riding club only allow 2 refusals before elimination. I can understand why the BSJA do it, but surely riding club should be encouraging the real novices? Still Nick was really pleased with Puk and even more pleased that just for once he managed to compete without falling off :-)
It was a really nice, stress free outing. We’re looking forward to the next one already.