Bucks County Horse Trials

I rode two client horses – Whimsical Dancer, who I had in Aiken with me – she goes home to her owner Lynn Travers in NH next weekend. I’ve known this mare for a long time, I had her and broke her as a 3-year-old and sold her as a 5-year-old. Lynn sent her back to me for some training and she’s been doing great, she had a 27 in dressage. She’s a lovely Dutch mare. She was also clear in both jumping phases and finished on her dressage score. She is a big mare and a big mover and she needed some more muscling and strength; she’s physically in a really good place to go back to her owner to have some fun with her.

Also riding Lynne Bauer’s Rhapsody in the novice and will take her training in two weeks, she’s a little bit green and needed a couple of confident rides. She is a beautiful mover; she’s done hunters and sidesaddle, we got her last year and she hasn’t had a ton of eventing experience. She’s a very nice Hanoverian mare and scored a 21 in dressage and finished on that with two nice, confident jumping rounds. I haven’t ridden her as much, I’m usually teaching Lynn on her and I’ve only jumped her a handful of times. Since she’s green to eventing I wanted really strong, confident jumping rounds with her so that when Lynne is back in the irons they can have a nice solid year at training and I think we accomplished what we were looking for.

The plan with both of these horses was to give them a head-start for their owners to get on them and have some confident rides. They are both fabulous movers who can clearly do much more!

I was the rider representative and it was neat to be a part of that and go over the courses with the TD. I had an easy weekend because the courses were fantastic! They changed a few things recently and everything looks great – I didn’t hear any complaints from anybody! I like how the rider rep is starting to take a stronger role in the event; today I have an evaluation to fill out, too. I think it will create better communication between competitors and officials if they really keep this up. If there are any questions right from the start they can be addressed early. It was fun to be asked to do this.

My student Beth Durden was doing training/prelim level and is moving up to prelim in a couple of weeks. She had one of her better tests, riding the prelim test for the first time – it was still training cross-country but they added in a few more combinations – the height was still training but they upped the difficulty so you got a little more of a feeling of prelim. We were looking for a good, confident round but I had her going out thinking like it was already prelim so we had a few things to work on. The change in speed, for example, was something to work on – it was nice to find the little details so we have things to work on before we go to the New Jersey Horse Park in a couple of weeks.