Lodestar Eventing

It was all aboard the new wagon at the weekend as Kirsty and Jad had qualified for the North-West Regional Dressage Finals at Somerford Park. Eager to bask in the reflected glory we had a full complement of hangers-on and ne-er do wells who managed to make the 7 a.m. leaving time.

Trakhener

Jad’s rivals in the competition were seriously well-bred. And I mean horses and riders! One girl going into the Prelim was executing perfect canter-pirouettes in the warm-up arena! Another was being coached by Lee Pearson. Camp men abounded.

Jad can turn in scores anywhere between 75% and 50% depending purely on how he’s feeling on the day. Today was an average day, and he scored just over 60% in both tests.

Meanwhile the support crew got on with the arduous task of drinking rose wine, and eating nibbles. In fact the event was so chilled out that we hung around for hours after Kirsty and Jad had finished their tests, chillling by the back of the box. The fact that we had been surrounded so completely that we couldn’t have got out without making serious use of the reversing camera had little to do with it, and it was only when the wine ran out that anyone showed an inclination to move.

Now that the finals are out of the way Jad is currently on a break. Come the end of August and Kirsty is going to enter some Elementary tests.

I took plenty of photographs and have put a photoset on flickr.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.