Although the weather in Florida has not exactly been hot and sunny, it’s been a lot better than the weather here I am sure. As a result, although everyone is still wearing warm winter blankets, the horses in Florida are getting lots of work and going to lots of new places.
The photos today were taken at Bruce Davidson’s Chesterland South. Solo and three of his buddies were loaded onto our new four horse trailer (we are still at the ‘very proud’ stage of ownership) and shipped about five minutes up the road. The wonderful thing about Ocala, is that everything is just next door. It takes about ten minutes to go cross country schooling, or ten minutes to ship to HITS to compete, it’s a lot of fun to have so many equestrian activities on your doorstep. Solo went to school at Bruce’s so that he could do the water jump and see some new obstacles and deal with another new situation. Unfortunately Bruce wasn’t there so we didn’t get to show Solo off to him.
Solo has always jumped well. He is very brave in terms of always jumping, but very spooky when it comes to taking a good look first. He does however, go over everything Selena asks him to jump, just very green sometimes. The flat work is improving. He is more and more comfortable with carrying the rider in balance and is getting much more confident in his transitions. It takes a while for the communication skills between rider and horse to develop. After all, we are teaching them a completely new method of communication, one of aids and signals. It takes a while to learn the nuances of a new language, the aids are no exception. He understand straight forward stuff like go, stop, turn, but now he has to learn some of the subtleties of the language.
It is gratifying to look at him now and think back to last winter when I was being led around on him and he was arguing every step of the way.
