Today was a a much better day altogether. After Woody’s disappointing ride yesterday, he went into the show jumping ring and jumped like a champ. He really did put in an absolutely wonderful show jumping round and of course the dressage from yesterday is history now.
The rails were falling today. The first two fences caught a lot of horses out, then there seemed to be a lot of combinations, some of them off difficult turns. One line that caused a lot of trouble was a triple of identical brown poles. I think it just looked like a sea of poles when they came around the turn and the horses didn’t have many strides to sort it out. Woody was fabulous from fence one to the end, not a weak fence in the whole course. Woody is in 27th, not where we wanted to be at this point but there is always tomorrow. He went up 18 places on his show jumping round. The commentary is awesome on the live stream BTW.
Later in the afternoon Selena piloted Kelly Damp’s Zephyr around the One Star. There are 77 horses in the one star, tonight Zephyr is in 14th spot and we are thrilled with him. He landed a bit of a belly flop at the first water and went under, head and all. When he and Selena surfaced, fortunately still together, Selena was sitting on one of her stirrup leathers, oopsy! She had to pull up and extricate it from under her butt, all of which caused her to have one time fault and believe it or not, the competition is so darned fierce that the one time fault cost her three places. He is in 14th going into show jumping tomorrow. I know Selena has been very happy with his performance all weekend, he is doing his job like a good boy.
I have been to many horse shows where people abandon their dogs. NOT the people who are at the horse show, but locals who know that horse people are animal people and they are going to pick it up. I got one of my own dogs that way at the North Georgia event many years ago. The event organizers at North Georgia, Kelly and Rich Temple, used to feed and gather the local strays prior to a big event and then talk all the eventers into taking one home. It was like a breed. What kind of dog do you have? Oh, I have a North Georgia Stray. Someone dropped a puppy off in the ditch at CI. There are a lot of homeless dogs in the Southern States. This one was lucky, the vet picked him up and he has a new mummy – not Anne Marie although you can hardly tell from this picture. Apparently he is ridiculously soft and fluffy and is just too cuddly to walk past.
Well, lets see if the two boys can climb any higher up the leaderboard tomorrow. Woody does cross country and apparently it’s huge! Zephyr has his show jumping to do and so far the show jumping has been taking a toll on the two and three star horses. Fingers crossed.
