So on Saturday we made the journey down to Bishop Burton to do the Jump and Style competition. Basically for those who don’t know what this is it’s in some ways a one day event condensed into a 4 minute jumping round. The first part of the course is mainly show jump style jumps with the second part being more rustic/ knock able cross country style questions. You then marked by a judge on style on items such as riders position and horses submission (just like in a dressage test!).
It was being held in the International Arena which is truly stunning. Large, Light and Quite busy is the best way to describe it. Our first issue was going to be the warm up- being next to the cow shed especially seems his previous record with warm up areas hasn’t always been great/ easy! However, as normal Mr Harley surprised me and behaved very well allowing horses to canter and jump toward him without spinning around/ decking me on the floor! A sign that he’s finally starting to grow up perhaps?
We went in all I can say is that he went totally green on me! Very disappointing considering how he’s been working at home but these things happen.
He seemed to be asking questions such as ‘Why is there a tree indoors?’ ‘There’s a fence there, but there’s also a fence next to it and another behind so which one am I jumping?’
He seemed to have a pattern of jumping one or two nicely then coming to the next fence having a green stop but then jumping it at the second attempt. He was also getting very deep which is quite unlike him.
So unfortunately it was Elimination due to it being a competition- If only we could school round 1st and then jum
On the positive he did show some promise at some of the jumps so I’m hoping its just a case of more practise and it will be interesting to see how he goes next year as the JAS classes do seem to have a trend of the 1st time horses experience them they go very green but improve on their second attempt.
The photographer managed to take two shots that sums up the post (Not sure either of these will make the wall of fame any time soon though!)
http://www.chrislax.co.uk/2012/JAS%20Bishop%20Burton%20Jan%202012/BE90/slides/CLA_8561.html
But we did manage to get one decent shot before the DVD disk got full to prove that he can jump!
I have to thank www.thehorsewardrobe.co.uk though for my lovely saddle pad which we got to don for the 1st time hopefully we will manage to get lots of nice pictures from more successful events this year!