Another fun little competition opportunity came up this month. A local up and coming eventing and boarding facility held a low key jump derby in their lawn today. It was Halloween themed and costumes were encouraged so I decided that would be pretty darn fun.
The day was wet; but again about mid 50s so not cold. It was manageable. We got all decked out in our purple, our twinkle dust and sparkles and headed off to the show.
Did I mention it was wet? As badly as I wanted to wear my wings as we flew over jumps, I decided to forgo them due to the amount of water coming from the sky. Wet wings would be heavy and could throw us off balance.
We were able to do most of our warm up in the nice big indoor arena but the jumps were in the outdoor arena that was rapidly deteriorating in footing quality. By the time it was getting close to our turn to jump the course, I went out to hop over a few jumps to get in a jumping mind set. But the arena was a swamp. Deuce did not even want to canter in the mess. He carefully hopped over the cross rail a few times but he was not feeling too goo about the 2'6" vertical. He jumped it but he let me know he was not feeling confident about the footing. So I decided we would forgo any more jumping and just wing it on course. (the actual derby course was out on grass and while it was wet, traction was much better).
The course was really fun! It had elements of cross country and stadium jumps and twisted around in the field. Lots of big "scary" stuff too. With pumpkins and spiders and corn stalks and open things and all.
It was a good opportunity for us to test our confidence in new jumps.
We bounded across the start line and Deuce knew immediately what to do. All I had to do was show him to the next jump and keep my leg on. He cantered on boldly from the logs to the vertical to the big white bench with pumpkins. Then instead of a hard right to the next vertical we circled left to turn back to the vertical then a long gallop down to the lattice roll top and around the corner to the next vertical and another gentle sweep left to the blue coop. He was going so confidently at this point I was mostly cruising and I took that coop for granted (and there was no jump to it's left) so with no strong ride to the base, he dove left at the last minute and we had a run out. Darn it! We circled back, I sat up and road and he jumped it. Then it was a careful turn around left again to a open sloped vertical that I was a little worried about, but Deuce cleared without question, then back over the coop the other way, then a skinny roll top, then around to the barn then the final fence, a log with a pole and turn right to cross the finish! Not a clean round but a REALLY fun round! He jumped everything well and it was a huge confidence booster for me.
We did not participate in the costume class but we were one of the few that dressed up despite the rain so we got an honorary costume ribbon and even with a run out, we got a pretty pink fifth place ribbon. Yay!
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