Another week has whipped by. Three of the horses competed at Will O Wind, all were wonderful. It was our three sales horses and I hope they will all upgrade successfully at Grandview this coming weekend making them eminently saleable. It’s fun to have a string of such beauties coming along in the competition field, but now they need to move over and make room for us to ride the new babies that are coming up behind them.
Apart from our usual intake of four new Watson Horses, this year we have a four year old and a three year old out of Selena’s old Advanced mare, ‘Be Bold Juliet’. The four year old is a little girl and seems quite happy to be worked, we backed her and led Selena around on her last Summer, she was so quiet it didn’t seem worth doing any more and we turned her away after a couple of weeks. However, the three year old is a cheeky little boy by Jeanette Leask’s Advanced eventing stallion ‘Rather Well’. He is not as happy as his sister to have his idyllic childhood disturbed. He is a big boy and we will probably ride him for the whole summer unless the ground gets too hard for his young legs to hack on. His name is ‘Rather Boldly’…..we have these visions of the commentator “…and now on course is Selena O’Hanlon riding rather boldly….” heeheehee
Here at Hawkridge we are very busy. I have a very fun group of eventers and dressage riders who are coming to stay for the weekend. I normally travel to their barn twice a month to teach them but this is going to be so much fun having them come and play at Hawkridge. They stay at the local hotel and do pack lunches. We have a fun program planned for Saturday and Sunday of lessons, xc, hacking and musical ride (a home favourite). The weekend after is Grandview, then it’s Ottawa where one of our babies, Watson’s Cebastian, is going to be ridden at an event by Selena for the first time. He is five and a big sweetie. I think Selena is looking forward to it. We will only be home a day from that and off to Bromont with at least Solo in the back of the trailer. There is a possibility we will take Crosby and run him in the training if he is not sold. Unfortunately there is no regular Prelim, only the one star and our other two sales horses, Song of Songs and Dudley Do Right will not be able to qualify in time to run there.
There are also lots of horses queued up to come in for some training. This will be a short Summer for Selena to help me with the training horses as all going well, she will be away for the whole month of September at Training Camp for the WEGs. We are planning that Colombo will run at an OI somewhere to get him prepared to run Advanced at Richland Park which I think is in August. In September the provisional plan, if the footing is good, is to run at the American Eventing Championships which are to be in Chatahoochi, GA this year. It seems to be setting itself up for the usual summer circus that is a busy eventing barn, I love every minute of it. The only thing I regret is that with all the whirlwind of activity the summer always seems so very short.
