OSBERTON

Once again it was a last minute panic, having thought we had everything in place for our week away at Osberton, my helper for the week fell ill and was unable to make it so the plea went out via the wonderful medium of Facebook and I was fortunate to receive a reply from Sam Kirk who offered to work the week. A meeting was arranged in Peterborough services and away we went.

The main man for the week was First Impression (Bruce) having his first ever 3-day party in the CCI*. I also took Gloris Flight, in the hope that between Tuesday and Friday one more person would withdraw and we would get in from the wait list. (It didn’t happen.) Last but by no means least, was D’Artagnan Fidalgos (Ghost), one of Richmond Sport Horses current residents whom we took to show off in the Best of British Showcase. For Ghost it was a particularly educational week but he drew lots of attention, especially after peoples watched his jumping. Although poor Sam spent hours each day keeping him gleaming white!

Bruce made a really good start to his competition, with a nice test, although there is still room for improvement as when he gets a bit tense his tendency is to tuck his chin ever so slightly behind the vertical, but that’s homework for this winter….. His mark of 48.6 put us in 23^rd after the dressage phase, out of 120 starters. I think we were justifiably proud of his start.

The xc phase did not seem to be the toughest of courses, especially compared with the tracks he has done so well around recently, (Firle/Burnham Mkt) but it just goes to show that with horses one should never be complacent and we picked up an annoying stop at the arrowhead at fence 7b. We jumped the box in well and had a comfortable 6 strides around the tree but he just didn’t read the question as it was presented. The rest of the course was easy peasy and after the stop I didn’t press hard on the gas but we still only incurred 1.2 time faults. This was good in the one sense, that we know he can comfortably make that time over an 8 minute course and looking to the future should still be able to make the time at the next level, however one does feel that if we could be that quick then perhaps the course could have been measured a little tighter to make time faults a more influential factor. But ‘C’est la Vie’. It was our mistake on the day.

Bruce’s owner Teresa and her partner Dave took us for a lovely meal that evening which included a rather unexpected tour of the local town in search of a restaurant! Then Sam and I returned to the showground and headed for the disco…. Needless to say plaiting in the dark for an 8am trot up was not the most enjoyable of ways to begin the next day!

The boy pulled it out of the bag is the sj though with a fantastic clear, one of the first rounds that day to be clear and inside the time. We finished in 72^nd place. In order to really depress ourselves we worked out that without the stop he would have been 12^th. But to take away the positives, we know he is very capable of being competitive at this level. He will have a short holiday now before coming back for dressage and sj practice over the winter, ready to come out fighting in March with some intermediate runs and aim for a spring CCI, probably at Houghton.