Juliette - Petplan Equine Ambassador

Our autumn season kicked off with another trip to the fabulous Somerford Park in Cheshire for a three day residential training camp. Boodles was in fabulous form cross country and schooled over many of the Novice fences and combinations! Some grid work really helped us move forward in the show jumping phase showing that we are both capable of the bigger fences. We had a few hiccups with the show jumping but overall he was much improved. Boodles had a few days off after camp to recover from his exertions, before the first challenge of the autumn- our first ever BE90 Regional final at Munstead!

Preparations that week did not go entirely to plan. I had another exceptionally busy working week which left us needing last minute, late night farriery on the eve of the competition. Not as easy as it sounds (the lights at the yard are dim and there are no mains sockets). We were shoeing by head-torch and using a generator to power the hairdryer for the hoof filler Boodles needed! After arriving home about 11pm, I opened the dressage test (.....and a bottle of wine!) before setting the alarm for a 3.45am start. We arrived at Munstead at 7am in time to walk the cross country before we warmed up for dressage. A fairly good dressage mark of 28 left us mid-division going into the show jumping phase; however a pole down put us into 10th place and out of reach of a qualifying score. Frustratingly he felt very green in his show jumping; anyone would think we hadn’t practiced this bit. Honestly Boodles... WE CAN DO THIS!!

We headed to our second BE90 regional final at Little Downham at the end of September. Unfortunately despite yet more practice in the meantime our show jumping demons surfaced again and we had a dramatic stop and demolished the first fence! We re-grouped to restart the course and go clear show jumping and then cross country. I’ve tried to explain to Boodles that we can’t grind to a halt to inspect the jumps first... He forgot this apparently...

Sadly our attempts to qualify for the grassroots championships at Badminton 2018 had failed. Boodles is just not yet consistent enough to gain the required qualifying results, but he is certainly improving and so we look to next year for another opportunity, all being well. I had planned to attempt two further BE100’s at Oasby and Norton Disney in October, but with Boodles having issues (again) with the show jumping, I was undecided if I should proceed with this plan and risk a big E if he downed-tools when the fences were bigger. I emailed the secretary at Oasby to try and switch to the BE90, meanwhile we headed to more show jumping outings to see if he would manage to cope with a bigger course. The entries at Oasby had already closed and I received no response from my email. The day was getting closer and our show jumping course practice had gone pretty well. I decided to go for it, and early morning in mid-October we packed up the lorry and set off for another go at a BE100. What was I doing?? Were we really ready? I was about to find out.

A mediocre dressage of 35 preceded our trek to the dreaded show jumping arena. We warmed up well, very well in fact. We headed into the arena and started our round steadily. We cleared the first; rattled the second, wobbled at the third... he was losing confidence. We hit the next and his confidence collapsed. We stopped at the fifth. I rode the rest of the round in a much more determined fashion and we hit several poles but we got to the end! We had a pretty impressive score of 29 including time penalties, but we were round, and no big E!! Onto cross country and his improvement in this phase was clear. We sailed round CLEAR! He was easy to ride and settled into a lovely rhythm growing in confidence again as we went; a different horse to the one in the show jumping arena. I even treated myself to the video of our round- our first clear BE100 cross country! You can watch the video here - http://bit.ly/2AkYIaE. Brimming with confidence we decided to take our place in the BE100 at Norton Disney the following week. This time even our show jumping had improved (we rolled 4 poles but he towed me around the course much more boldly) followed by another clear around quite a technical cross country course, inside the time!! Well done Boodles! At last! His winter holiday was well deserved at this point. After an autumn break, the ponies head into winter feeling well. Jess has appeared at arena events at Aston Le Walls (8th in the 100 class) and Keysoe BE 100 arena event (double clear for 4th place). She heads for some more show jumping up to BS Discovery level over the next few months. She may be rising 22 years old next spring but she has lost none of her bounce, and only a little of her speed!

And Boodles? Well suprisingly we will be concentrating on our show jumping this winter too. My main aim is to complete a BS Discovery class with some sort of style, ready for the start of the 2018 event season.