Well pleased to say the Blog continues. Buoyed by my recent survival of the Yeringberg Horse Trials I have this time not required any, if little, prodding from Deb and co to continue, and so the story goes on, for the moment anyway.
The Yeringberg Horse Trials are held in the beautiful Yarra Valley wine region. Loaded up with Joopie (Mio Jupiter) entered in the CNC 1 Star and Rosemarie’s pony Ali (Dark Tan) in the Preliminary we head off in the early hours of the morning, my main mission for the day is to put into effect my carefully devised plan, a plan born of past failures (namely in the compulsory phase, the dressage). My plan is not a conventional one and I strongly suspect that quite a few of my eventing friends were rather sceptical about it (to say the least) in fact some of them came straight out and called me stupid. However not to be dissuaded I am determined to carry it out.
Now you won’t find my procedure in any sort of reputable horse riding manual, in fact you won’t find it in a disreputable one either. It requires entering the arena with absolutely zero warm up, I mean none at all, actually the first time I trot is when the judges horn is sounded (crazy you may say) however it works a treat (more on my theory shortly) and I manage to do the calmest test I believe I have ever done. Managing to navigate my way through the test with not too much bother at all, I do believe the plan works, calmness being my issue.
I must admit I have tried this ploy prior to entering the show jumping arena before but it was not terribly successful. Back: to my theory, I have found in the past that my horse does his best work in the first 20 minutes of his warm up session and then becomes increasingly hysterical, I go from sitting there thinking I'm going to give the dressage Queen’s a fair beating, to entering the arena and doing a complete disaster of a test complete with some newly invented crazy unheard of dressage movements and find myself consistently at the bottom of the pile. Ha Ha, not today, 6th from one judge and 14th from the other (what the!) anyway I'm sitting on 12th with my score over 60% not too bad for me.
Cross country day dawns and it looks kinda big, however we bang our way around it jumping clear but incur 17 time penalties (probably holding when I should have been kicking). In fact I think I end up with the most time penalties of anyone with clear rounds. The show jumping phase is next up and I am feeling just a tad nervous (for those that haven’t read my last Blog, I was fairly dusted in the showjump at my last comp at Woady Yallock and suffered an ego damaging incident) anyway I have a good warm up over the coloured poles and receive several motivational speeches from the punters and enter the arena like a flamin' lamb to the slaughter thinking about canters and counting and corners and strides and lower legs etc etc. Bell goes and I'm off, first fence is a big oxer and I fairly bulldoze it flat (I did sit and wait) continue on and he actually jumps really well only having one more unlucky one down, canter through the finish flags not eliminated and still on top of my horse feeling good about my eight penalties but more importantly thinking I had completed my first qualifier for Melbourne 3DE.
I am given a little shock when I look at the scoreboard and realize I have received an additional 8 time penalties. Apparently not a problem for my qualifier I quickly find out. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to get those changes, coming back to the trot in the 1 Star is really not a good look, not to mention time consuming ha ha. I end up in14th place, so then it’s off to Camperdown for the CIC 1 Star and hopefully my second qualifying run. With 50 in the class it’s going to be tough and I figure that I won’t trouble the scorer there. The new dressage plan will be pulled out of the bag again and I shall let you know how I get on. Looking forward to providing another instalment depending on the survival of Joopie and of course my good self ha ha
So for now, see ya round.
Editor's Note: Vaughan didn't have a photo to go with this blog so here is the photo he originally wanted to go on his Bio page. If you want to know the story behind this, you have to ask Vaughan but I can tell you that it was taken in Kentucky and this is not his wife!
