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In October, I was lucky enough thanks to the HorseQuest bursary to go to Hickstead showground to go arena eventing schooling with Jerry, before his holiday.
Once we had arrived, tacked up, and got on it was time to head down to the lovely arena. I did some arena familiarisation and then quickly got warmed up and ready to jump. We warmed up over a couple small log piles, ditch and some small houses.
Jerry was jumping nicely but going as forward and off my leg as I would have liked, therefore I decided to add in some walk to canter and open up his stride by doing light seat into the rest of the warm up jumps as I linked them together. I then decided to work mainly on tricky combinations as he was feeling super confident and ready.
I then started linking together some slightly bigger jumps focusing on a nice forward rhythm that isn’t reliant on my leg. I started to have a play with lines, by coming in at an angle and/or joining up some more simple combinations.
Following this we then worked on some more complex combinations, for example one consisted of a wide brush fence to a two strided upright corner on an angle. We didn’t get the best lines the first time causing a bad stride but came round again for another attempt and we flew it!
After that we worked on skinnies before we progressed onto bigger fences. We started off with a nice arrowhead skinny to a very narrow barrow to a small house all on a offset line, my aim for this was to have enough canter at the start but try to keep him on his hocks so that we would be able to keep a nice fluent line all the way through. He aced this making it feel very effortless! I
then came round to a slightly bigger fence, to a hickstead roll top, two strides, to a skinny.
He flew this so we then moved on to some slightly bigger fences. We kept the theme of working on combinations when the fenced got bigger and trying to get a forward stride. Jerry definitely was feeling up for this as he became much more off my leg and gave such a lovely feeling over each fence making it effortless. I ended up linking together a course of roughly 90cm to 1m before we headed down towards the water splash.
As Jerry is unclipped and was now rather sweaty we decided to have a play in the water going up and down the steps and jumping in and out of the water. This is by far his favourite part as he loves to splash about and pull funny faces when the splashes hit him. I then walked him through to cool him off, let him have a drink and then walked him back to the trailer where he ate lots of
treats.
Some other very exciting news is the arrival of a new pony, Harry. Harry is a 14.2hh 5 year old show pony who I brought to produce for next year. He has settled in so well and is already mums yard favourite (don’t tell Jerry or Charlie!) Harry is currently muscling up as he is still quite weak and needs lots more muscle definition. Can’t wait to see what the season hold for us.
Thank you so much here are some links to Jerry jumping; https://youtu.be/3kRwjM4i57k
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